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A a

A
Adenine. A purine base for DNA and RNA that pairs with the pyrimidine base thymine (T) in DNA and Uracil (U) in RNA. GMW of the isolated base is 135.1 grams per mole.

A
A designation of the standard time one hour ahead of universal time (UT), and of the zone for which it is the local time. Thank God for adenine; this one would be a hell of a discouraging entry to start off a glossary.

This is called a ``standard time zone,'' so naturally there must be multiple standards... Simplest is the ideal standard time zone: ideal standard time zone A is centered on the meridian 15° east of the prime meridian; specifically, it is the lune between 7.5° E and 22.5° E. Nautical time, used in radio communication by ships when they are outside territorial waters, is based on nautical standard time zones that coincide with the ideal time zones away from land (and apparently are not specifically defined within territorial waters). On land, standard time zone A is the union of those regions by or for which it is adopted. Time zone A includes most of western continental Europe and a continuous swath of countries in Africa.

In continental Europe the zone ranges from Spain to Albania to Norway. Standard time for this part of Europe is more frequently called by descriptive names like `Central European Time' (CET) or the equivalent (e.g., MEZ). The time-zone boundaries within Europe all coincide with international borders. In continental Europe, only Portugal is in time zone Z -- standard time the same as universal time. (The UK and the Irish Republic are also in the Z time zone.) In the northeast, the time-zone boundary runs along the borders of Norway and Sweden (A) with Finland (B). Finland is the northernmost land in time zone B; islands to the north are Norwegian or Russian, and keep the corresponding times. The line where Norway and Russia abut north of Finland is the border between time zone A and time zone C.

From the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, the time-zone boundary line runs for a ways along the border of Poland with the former Soviet Union. It starts generally eastward along the border of Poland with Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast to the north. (That bit of Russia is most of the northern part of old East Prussia, which included Prussia's historic capital Königsberg. The region was assigned to Russia at the Yalta conference. The capital city, and hence the region, was renamed for Kalinin, an old Bolshevik who finally kicked the bucket shortly after the end of the Great Patriotic War. The surviving German population of the region was deported, or allowed to flee. Hey, it just occurred to me: expelling people from their homeland is against international law!) Kaliningrad Oblast is the only part of Russia that keeps standard time A.

It's big world, so it's possible someone besides the author may read this entry.

The time-zone boundary continues east along the border between Poland and Lithuania (you know, those were a single kingdom not so many centuries ago), then south along the western borders of Belarus and Ukraine (time zone B) with Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary (A). So far, it looks pretty systematic: former bits of the USSR, including the Slavic-language countries that use a Cyrillic alphabet, are all on the B side of the line between zones A and B, while former Warsaw-Pact members other than the USSR, including Slavic-language countries that use a Roman alphabet, lie in time zone A.

Further south, however, this convenient and mnemonic system begins to break down. It seems that some extraneous matter, such as longitude, was allowed into consideration. (That wasn't allowed to interfere on the west: Spain and France are almost entirely within 7.5 degrees of the prime meridian; most of the Portuguese-Spanish border runs just east of the 7.5° W meridian, so Portugal would be mostly in the N time zone, if astronomy mattered very much.) At all events, Romania (with Moldova) is the northernmost former Warsaw-Pact country (aside from the USSR) to be in time zone B. The time-zone boundary continues south along Romania's western border with Hungary and then with Serbia, making the latter southerly country (jugo- means `south-') the northernmost Cyrillic-using country in time zone A.

[This is by a little bit only. Bosnia, which extends almost as far north, uses both Cyrillic and Roman alphabets. A Bosnian immigrant who manages at a local Walgreen's told me that before the war (when she fled to Germany), television news in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina would alternate alphabets, using Roman characters for captions one day, then Cyrillic captions the next day. (As far as she knows, the practice continues.) She found the Cyrillic inconvenient: although she studied and used both alphabets in school, she was always more comfortable with the Roman characters. Her husband professes surprise that she could find the Cyrillic difficult. Her grandparents used a version of Arabic script adapted to the same language (Serbo-Croatian, called ``Bosnian'' in this context). But Arabic script is a challenge even for Arabic. Even though the whole family speaks the same language, the Arabic script was practically a secret code; grandma would leave a note for grandpa, and he was the only one who could decipher it. Nowadays I'm told that in the US, cursive is similarly impenetrable to schoolchildren.

The spelling of German by Yiddish-speakers may be regarded as a similar situation. My mother studies Yiddish every so often, despite her vow to stop learning new languages. I suppose Yiddish is a fair exception, since German is her native language and Hebrew is one of those languages she studied and half forgot.

Yiddish is mostly German, with quite a bit of Hebrew and some influence from Slavic languages, written in Hebrew characters. Of course, Germanic phonology, no less in the Yiddish language than in the standard German, was not a very good fit to the Hebrew script, originally. Heck, just think what the Greeks had to do with a related north Semitic script to write their own Indo-European language. The way the problem was solved in Yiddish was to give up a single set of pronunciation rules: Hebrew words in Yiddish retain their Hebrew spellings, and non-Hebrew words are written using a completely different set of rules and a somewhat different set of sound correspondences.

Something similar happens in many languages. Coming up with rules for the pronunciation of words spelled in English works better if one distinguishes Latinate and non-Latinate classes of words. (It was not always so. Latin words absorbed into Old English were pronounced according to their Latin spellings and common English pronunciation rules for Latin characters. Then again, since the pronunciations of the Latin characters were based on their pronunciation in Latin, the situation wasn't so bad.) Of course, Yiddish spelling is rather more phonetic than English, although you have to reason out the vowels in the the Hebrew vocabulary. A similar effect, but on a smaller scale, is the fact that patterns of vowel devoicing in Japanese are different for gairaigo than for Yamato and Sino-Japanese words.

Yiddish-speakers normally use the Ashkenazi (northern and eastern European) pronunciation of Hebrew. The main traditional alternative, the Sephardi pronunciation (originally Spanish, common around the Mediterranean in the modern era), was taken as the basis for modern Hebrew. When my mom was in school (in Nazi Germany), she learned the two pronunciations as liturgical and modern pronunciations. One indication that Sephardi pronunciation is not true to Biblical Hebrew is the fact that it uses the same sound for various alphabetic characters marked for different pronunciation.

Getting back to the writing-German-words-in-Yiddish thing... A big part of the problem is vowels. When you count long and short separately, standard German has 14 to (including diphthongs) 19 vowels, and Yiddish (``Yiddish'' is an English transliteration of the German and Yiddish word spelled jüdisch in German, meaning `Jewish') has not much less. In standard German this profusion is handled partly by digraphs and Umlauts, partly by using doubled consonants to indicate that a preceding vowel is short, by other onsonant-based clues, and occasionally by memorization. By contrast, Hebrew script represents vowels mostly by indirection. (Okay, and also by matres lectionis.]

The time-zone boundary continues along the western border of Bulgaria with Serbia and Macedonia (or FYROM or whatever), then west along the northern border of Greece with FYROM (don't even think of calling it Macedonia; Masodonia, perhaps) and Albania, on out to the Adriatic.

Gee, time zones are interesting. Time zone A in Africa (where it is typically called the ``West Africa Time'' zone, WAT) includes about 15 countries I know little about, from Tunisia and Algeria in the north to Namibia (a German colony before WWI) in the south. Among these only the Democratic Republic of the Congo (old Zaïre) is in two time zones. That is quite appropriate, as it's about the least unified country. Only Tunisia and Namibia observe Daylight Saving Time (DST) -- Tunisia in the Summer and Namibia in the Winter. Man, those guys are crazy. Please don't ask me about Antarctica.

a.
Adjective. One of the ``parts of speech.'' Further discussion, possibly surprising, at the noun entry.

A
Advanced. A prefix that is productive in the grammatical sense. A temporary attribute. A retarded name, as we would have said (and known) in elementary school). SBF offers an initiation into Advanced Smileys.

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A.
Aeschylus. This is the established conventional abbreviation used by classicists (writing in English) in citations. It doesn't stand for Aristophanes (Ar.), Aristotle (Arist.), or Athenaeus (Ath.). Aeschylus is reckoned ``the father of tragedy.'' Mnemonic for the abbreviation: ``A tragedy should be brief.''

A
Alpha. Not the expansion here, just the FCC-recommended ``phonetic alphabet.'' I.e., a set of words chosen to represent alphabetic characters by their initials. You know, ``Alpha Bravo Charlie ... .'' The idea behind the choice is to have words that the listener will be able to guess at or reconstruct accurately even through noise (or narrow bandwidth, like a telephone). Hence, ``Artisan'' would be no good because it might be heard as ``Partisan.''

Personally, I prefer ``Aorta.'' If they ask you to repeat you can say ``Aneurysm.''

A Greek friend of mine has the surname Petr... He made a phone reservation at a restaurant (in the US), and when he arrived they couldn't find him listed: Because the ``p'' is unaspirated (in contrast with initial plosive consonants /p/ and /t/ in English) they had heard ``Etr...'' For a similar but more widely experienced misunderstanding, see the enema entry.

Å
Symbol for a metric unit named after Anders Jonas Ångström. Å is also a character used in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. For some information about that, see this Aa entry.

In a 1913 article in Annalen der Physik (Leipzig), I noticed the use of Å.-E., evidently for Ångström-Einheit, `Ångström unit.' The article was by Peter Paul Koch (fourth series, vol. 42, no. 11: ``Über die Messung der Intensitätsverteilung in Spektrallinien. II''). Other articles just used Å. Perhaps this was an earlier usage that was trailing off.

Late in the nineteenth century there was an equivalent expression that is now not only obsolete but unlikely to be understood by most scientists: ``tenth-meter.'' (Actually, I've only ever seen it as ``tenth-metre.'' I don't find much occasion to read 19th c. scientific journals from the US.) Tenth-meter meant 10-10 meter, and was part of a fairly systematic terminology pattern. It was particularly common in electricity and magnetism.

A
Amp, Ampere. Abbreviation and symbol for the ampere (also amp), the SI base unit for electric current, named after André Marie Ampère (1775-1836). The electric charge unit is the coulomb, a derived unit defined as one ampere-second (C = A s).

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a
Annus. Latin, `year.'

A+, A+
A-plus is A programming language. It has a strong APL flavor to it. Well duh. A+ is an extension of the A language, the latter created with the intention of replacing APL in 1988. Both A and A+ were created at Morgan Stanley, which gives a hint of the intended applications. A itself was created by Arthur Whitney, who went on to create the K language (1993), a proprietary array language. The worst feature of the A language is its name, which makes it hard to google for help. It is hard even to confirm my conjecture that A was never released as such (rather than wrapped in A+). For help with A+, start at <aplusdev.org>. K, unlike A+, got rid of the extra special characters used by APL, but replaced them by sequences of ordinary punctuation marks.

A
Arbeitsgemeinschaft. See AG.

A
Until 1957, the chemical symbol for argon (Ar since then).

A
Arts & Sciences. (Shhh!) For an even more extreme abbreviation of A&S, see NATAS.

A
Assist. Scorecard abbreviation.

A.
Atlantic Reporter. Legal publication.

A
Atomic mass number. Also mass number for short, but don't call it atomic mass: the mass number is an integer (the number of nucleons in the nucleus) that is numerically close to the atomic mass -- the mass of the atom in atomic mass units (amu) -- because both kinds of nucleon have a mass close to 1 amu.

Don't you just hate it when writers do that (define important stuff [like a head term in its glossary entry, say] parenthetically)? Me too.

Another thing not to confuse A with is atomic number -- the number of protons in a nucleus. Don't be too embarrassed; I've been guilty of this myself, recently. At some point, I had stopped using the term (atomic number) altogether and started thinking of it as a quantity called ``zee'' (or maybe ``zed,'' by those folks from whom we are separated by a common language) and represented by the variable Z.

Maybe chemists prefer the long name (viz. atomic number). In chemistry and atomic physics, Z is vastly more important because chemical properties and atomic spectra depend primarily on Z, and much less on A. [The quantitative differences are typically on the order of the ratio of the electron mass to the nuclear mass, and so a fraction of a percent even in the extreme case of hydrogen.] In nuclear physics, A and Z are of comparable importance. (To take a well-knwn example, the liquid-drop model gives a nuclear binding energy whose dominant terms are powers of A, and Z only comes in as a smaller but important Z2/A1/3 correction.)

A very visible asymmetry between A and Z is that each Z has its own associated name (``hydrogen'' for Z=1, etc.), so the Z=3 nuclei, for example, can be referred to collectively as ``lithium isotopes.'' By contrast, since there is no specific name corresponding to an A value (other than ``nucleon'' for A=1). The composition of a nucleus is thus specified by the combination of a number for A and a chemical symbol for Z (e.g., 6Li and 7Li for the stable isotopes of lithium). I know of no elegant way of naming an isobar (the family of nuclei with a common value of A). At least, you typically have to specify a number. There are special cases, of course. You could refer to the A=3 nuclei as the ``tritium isobar.'' People would probably look at you funny for not just saying ``tritium and helium-three.''

A
Attendance. Scorekeeping abbreviation, if you're keeping score on what's happening in the stands.

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A.
Latin, Aulus. A praenomen, typically abbreviated when writing the full tria nomina.

There are rather many other words which A abbreviates in Latin inscriptions.

A
Diode imperfection factor. Alternate symbol and name for nonideality factor n. I've only ever seen this symbol used in solar-cell work (the conventional solar cell is a diode). See also A0.

A
Time Zone A. UTC+1. Also called CET and MEZ.

aA
AbAmpere. An old abbreviation for an old unit. An abampere was the base unit of current in the cgs electromagnetic units. The same current was expressed in cgs electrostatic units as ``c statamperes.'' That is, using an approximate value for c of 3×1010 cm/sec, an electric current of 1 abampere was equal to an electric current of 3×1010 statamperes (and 10 amperes, in the MKSA system). Cf. this spiffy new electromagnetic unit aA.

Aa, aa
Aa is the two-letter symbol for Å. (Naturally, aa is used for the lower-case form å.) Å is a special (i.e., non-English) vowel symbol used in all the major Scandinavian languages. It's also used by scientists to abbreviate a metric unit that when not abbreviated is typically written Angstrom. It also seems to occur in some English-speakers' pendants (twice for ANNA). (Follow this link for HTML-related information on the ISO-Latin-1 issues.)

Because of some fussy alphabetical-order issues with å, this entry is probably as good a place as any to discuss the alphabets used in Swedish, Icelandic, Danish, and the Norwegian languages, with particular attention to the special vowel symbols.

We start with Swedish, either because the eponymous Ångström was a Swede, or because Swedish is the language for which I am aware of the fewest confusing details. In Swedish, the alphabet starts with the same 26 letters as the English alphabet, followed by å, ä, and ö in that order. I.e.,

a, b, c, ... v, w, x, y, z, å, ä, ö.

The letters c, q, w, and z occur only in a few names. The letter w used to be treated as a variant of v, and alphabetization usually ignored the difference. (Words beginning in v and w could be mixed up in a dictionary the same way words beginning in v and V can be mixed up in an English dictionary.) Thus, while the Swedish alphabet was (sometimes) read off with v and w separately named, from the perspective of alphabetization, the alphabet was best regarded as just 28 letters:

a, b, c, ... v, x, y, z, å, ä, ö.

In 2005, the Swedish Academy decreed or suggested or whatever that the v and w be thenceforth treated more distinctly for alphabetization purposes, so the w has its place as further above.

In Danish, æ is used where Swedish uses ä, and ø is usually used in place of Swedish ö. The symbol corresponding to Swedish å, and its place in the alphabet, have changed once or twice in the last couple of centuries. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the double-a was often treated as a distinct symbol on a par with single letters like a or b, the same way ch, ll, and rr were traditionally treated in Spanish. In some cases but not all, the double-a assumed the same position in the alphabet as å did in Swedish. Hence, the alphabet was either

a, b, c, ... v, w, x, y, z, aa, æ, ø,

or it was

a, b, c, ... v, w, x, y, z, æ, ø.

and aa was alphabetized like a pair of letters a. By the 1940's the latter pattern had become common. In 1948, however, there was a spelling reform that replaced aa with å. The question of order was not immediately settled, but in 1955 it was decided to place that symbol at the end of the alphabet, yielding

a, b, c, ... v, w, x, y, z, æ, ø, å.

This means that the word for river (aa) was once usually near the end of the dictionary (ordbog), then sort of drifted up to nearly the front, and then in 1955 got kicked even further back than where it began (as å). It must be discouraging to be an aa. (Cf. aa.) Just as in Swedish, w was once treated as a variant, and not distinguished for purposes of alphabetization. [Another item that is (or was) read off as part of the alphabet (in English) but which doesn't (and didn't) count equally in alphabetization: ampersand.] Danish practice was officially conformed to the international pattern (w distinct from v) in 1980.

Again as in Swedish, the letters c, q, w, and z are in fact rare. In addition, the x is also rare in Danish.

Norway had a distinct national language at one point, but over the course of four centuries of Danish rule, Danish became the national language -- both officially and for the creation of literature. After Norway finally became independent of Denmark in 1814, there was a broad desire to distinguish Norwegian from Danish, and to recover a distinct national language. It's a long and lugubrious story, but happily for this entry the Norwegians didn't tamper too much with the alphabet. It is the same now as the Danish alphabet, though they may have been quicker to adopt (and place at the end of the alphabet) the letter å. Hence, the order for Norwegian is again

a, b, c, ... v, w, x, y, z, æ, ø, å.

Norwegian replaced aa with å in 1917. Presumably, commingled feelings of pride and resentment must have accompanied Denmark's conformation to å in 1948.

Icelandic has enough letters. Here is their order for the purposes of alphabetization:

a, á, b, c, d, ð, e, é, f, g, h, i, í, j, k, l, m, n, o, ó, p, q, r, s, t, u, ú, v, w, x, y, ý, z, þ æ, ö

I'm serious about the acute-accented characters: floti (`fleet') precedes fló (`flea'). The letter á corresponds to the å in Danish (so á means `river'). The é was only introduced in the twentieth century, to represent a palatalized version of e that was previously very reasonably written je. One is inclined to suspect that they did it just to have a complete set of acute-accented vowels. The acute marks were originally intended to indicate vowel quantity (i.e., accented vowels were of longer duration), but like the long-short vowel distinction in English, that's gone rather by the boards.

This list is a few too many letters long for schoolchildren to sing. The sung alphabet consists only of

a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u (or v), x, y, þ æ, ö.

(Although ð is the voiced version of þ, it is considered ``subordinate'' to d.) The letter z was abolished in 1974, but I left it in the alphabetization alphabet because abolished or no, it is part of names, and some people and institutions continue to insist on using it.

AA
Academy of Aphasia. I had the impression that this organization became moribund along with the late chair of its Board of Governors, linguist Victoria A. Fromkin. What was the matter with my head!? Here's the website.

Try also Alicia Courville's Speech Disorders page or the National Aphasia Association (NAA).

AA
Acceso Abierto. A loan translation to Spanish from and for the English `Open Access.'

AA
Acronyms Anonymous. See AAAAAA.

AA
Administrative Assistant. Someone not a secretary who handles a share (tending toward the more bureaucratic component) of an administrator's workload. Cf. PA.

AA
Administrative Authority. (ISO term, at least.)

AA
Advertising Association. A UK federation of about 30 ``trade bodies representing the advertising and promotional marketing industries including advertisers, agencies, media and support services.'' They have a logo that consists of two lower-case alphas vertically aligned.

AA
Advising Associate.

AA
Aerolineas Argentinas.

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A. A.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon. Standard abbreviation for classicists (writing in English) in the citations of scholarly papers. Yes, it's meant to be obscure. Hadn't you figured that out yet?

AA
Affirmative Action. As in the EE/AA or EO/AA.

The current use of the term affirmative action goes back to a 1965 executive order (EO) issued by US President Lyndon Johnson. The order required federal contractors to ``take affirmative action'' to see that ``employees are treated fairly during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.''

As initially understood, if it was initially understood, the term referred to positive efforts by employers (or educational institutions) to seek out and hire qualified applicants from under-represented groups and to be proactive in eliminating illegitimate causes of that under-representation. It was initially supposed that mere outreach efforts would suffice to right the historical imbalance.

The landmark Civil Rights legislation of 1964 (which does not use the term affirmative action) was intended to illegalize discrimination based on race alone (rather than any possible statistical correlates of race) and to encourage recruitment of minorities. When the crucial bills were being debated in the Senate, Hubert Humphrey (D-MN), later to be vice-president in the second, full LBJ administration, famously offered to eat the bill page by page if it led to preferential treatment for blacks. (At the time, blacks were the only group recognized as under-represented; afterwards, other groups were given official recognition as under-represented. This official recognition is not affected by the fact that the recognized group is -- as a mathematical necessity -- over-represented in some other field. It is virtually assured as a matter of probability that all groups are under-represented in some field, so we can look forward to a day when all groups enjoy the protection of equal-opportunity laws.)

Black representation in professional, managerial, and other kinds of employment deemed desirable or high-status had been increasing steadily for a number of years before the passage of equal employment opportunity legislation, so it was reasonable to suppose that aggressive recruiting and the elimination of artificial barriers to employment might substantially solve the perceived imbalance problem. In the event, progress was not deemed satisfactory, and during the Nixon administrations affirmative action took on a new meaning. A series of executive orders, administrative-law rules and landmark court cases led to a system of set-asides and quotas, and a supporting system of official lies and evasions. Concomitantly, the meaning of ``qualified'' was adjusted to meet the psychological and ideological needs of the political moment. People who think of themselves as liberal today, and who curse the memory of Richard Nixon, generally subscribe to the cynical vision of civil rights progress put in place by him.

The contradiction in meaning and in underlying assumptions, between AA as initially understood and as eventually implemented, offers the creative pollster the opportunity to prove any desired thesis. If you want to show that people favor affirmative action, you ask people whether they support the principles of the early, minimalist definition of affirmative action. If you want to demonstrate widespread opposition to affirmative action, you describe the most egregious examples of its implementation and ask whether the respondent approves.

AA
Agricultural Area. Abbreviation that occurs in EU statistical literature.

A. A.
Alan Alexander Milne. His series of Winnie-the-Pooh books began in 1924, with Christopher Robin, the young friend of Winnie the Pooh, modeled on his own four-year-old son, Christopher Robin, friend-at-a-distance of a bear named Winnie at the London zoo. The nonfictional Christopher Robin went on to become a bookseller (cf. Zola, discussed at Aix entry).

Christopher Robin Milne was always uncomfortable with his fame.

The rights to the use of the Pooh characters and images are nowadays held by Walt Disney.

A. A. also got his son a teddy bear. That bear currently resides in New York City.

I wonder if these Milnes are any relation to E. A. Milne, the mathematical physicist and Bruce Medalist?

AA
Alcoholics Anonymous. (Also this URL.)

The same abbreviation is used in French (for Alcooliques Anonymes -- sounds kinda cool), German (Anonyme Alkoholiker or Gemeinschaft der Anonymen Alkoholiker) and Spanish (Alcohólicos Anónimos). The Spanish adjective alcohólico is slightly unusual: since the aitch is silent, the word has an o-o diphthong, the two component vowels clearly distinguished (in careful speech) by the stress on the second. FWIW, when the word alcohol was borrowed into Japanese, the -oho- was collaped into a long o: arukôru.

AA
Alzheimer's Association.

We have an Alzheimer's disease (AD) entry.

AA
American Airlines.

A.A.
American Association. A late-nineteenth-century baseball league.

A&A
Amniocentesis and Abortion. This is really a pro-life shibboleth for amniocentesis. Anti-abortion groups tend to take a dim view of amnio. They figure, if you're not considering abortion, there's nothing you need to know in advance. (Not exactly true, particularly nowadays with in utero medical interventions.)

A.A., AA
Anadolu Ajansi. Normally translated `Anadolu Agency,' which isn't very informative to me. Anadolu looks like it could be Turkish for `Anatolia.' In any case, AA is the Turkish national news agency. It was founded on the evening of April 6, 1920, as you will learn on this page, where the word great occurs five times. ``We are proud to do our share towards globalization with perfectionism, accuracy and speed. ANADOLU is a front-runner in the use of communication technologies for the high-end. WE ARE THE LEADING AGENCY'' and an EANA member.

In one of his books, Bernard Lewis describes, inter alia, the history of newspaper publishing in the Muslim world. I think the book's title is What Went Wrong.

AA
An[a]esthesiologist's Assistant. See AAAA.

A&A
Anesthesia & Analgesia. A technical journal.

AA
AntiAircraft (gun[s] or fire). Or Antiaircraft Arms. Slang equivalent ``ack-ack.''

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A&A
Antike und Abendland. Beiträge zum Verständnis der Griechen und Römer und ihres Nachlebens, Berlin.

AA
Application Association.

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AA
Archäologischer Anzeiger. A German archaeology journal catalogued in TOCS-IN.

AA
Arithmetic Average. The thing usually meant by average or mean, when not otherwise qualified. Dictionaries seem overwhelmingly to prefer the term ``arithmetic mean'' to ``arithmetic average'' as a more specific term, but in ordinary usage ``arithmetic mean'' seems to be not even twice as common as ``arithmetic average.'' Frankly, neither the editor nor I can recall encountering the term ``arithmetic average'' before. The term doesn't seem to be limited in distribution to the RotW (outside North America, in this instance). What probably happened is that google invented 800,000 bogus web pages to fake us out. Either that, or it's a dumbed-down term invented and used by people who didn't absorb (very deeply) mathematics and its conventional terminology in school.

The words average and mean, if not explicitly qualified, both mean a sum divided by the number of its addends. This is, in general terms, a ``measure of central tendency.'' Two other measures of central tendency are the median and mode. One might call these discontinuous measures, since their values are discontinuous functions of the numbers whose distribution they describe the central tendency of. Other continuous measures of central tendency are usually named with the word mean. The most common such alternatives that I can think of are ``geometric mean,'' ``harmonic mean,'' and ``logarithmic mean.''

In Hong Kong, the phrase ``AA <system>'' (with AA pronounced as an English initialism and <system> representing a Chinese or Cantonese translation of the English word system) is the practice of splitting a restaurant or entertainment bill. Presumably this arose specifically from the practice of dividing the bill equally, so each person paid the AA cost. I'm not sure whether the term is still used strictly in this sense or may also now refer to an arrangement in which all individuals pay their own expenses. The latter is called ``Dutch treat'' in English-speaking countries (and ``pagar a la americana'' in South America). I needn't have explained my uncertainties. I could have just said the AA system means ``to go Dutch'' without further specification and left it at that, but I wanted to share.

(In China as in the US, Chinese restaurants usually serve dishes to the table, and individuals serve themselves. Hence, there is only one straightforward way to share the expenses, and no ambiguity.)

AA
(US) Armed Forces (in the rest of the) Americas. Designation excludes US and Canada. This region is loosely called ``Central and South America,'' which technically would exclude the Caribbean and also (irrelevantly for the foreseeable future, though not for the foreseeable past) Mexico. Two-letter ``state'' code used by the MPSA and USPS. (For USPS purposes, US Armed Forces stationed out-of-country are served by ``domestic mail,'' and so require a ``state'' code.)

Mail bound for the AA region used to be (and I believe still is) routed through processing centers at Miami, and used to be nominally bound for Florida. Using FL (for Florida) instead of AA still works for mail, but will probably cause problems with credit-card verification, so don't do it. For more on MPSA/USPS military mail, see the MPO entry.

AA
Associate in Arts. A two-year post-secondary degree.

A&A
Astronomy & Astrophysics.

AA
Atomic Abs. Ventral annihilation. A six-pack of twenty-ounce cans of U-235. Buff b... Oh. Actually, AA is short for Atomic Absorption. Never mind. See AAS instead.

aA
AttoAmpere. One ampere equals 1018 attoamperes, demonstrating that the ampere is an unimaginably humongous unit -- so ginormous as to be of no practical use.

AA
German, Auswärtiges Amt -- `Foreign Office' (FO).

AA
Author's Alterations. Authors' Alterations, if the work is a conspiracy. Changes to the proofs after they're in galley. Doesn't that sound cool and insiderish? It's probably nonsense. AA is changes made to the text that's done up in galley proofs. Book contracts usually have a clause that you didn't notice, to the effect that if AA's are substantial, the author is penalized. I contributed to an encyclopedia, however, which due to time constraints was typeset during reviews. I don't know what they do when the reviews are unfavorable or ask for extensive changes.

AA
Auto Answer. A standard light on an external modem.

AA
Automobile Association. The name of the Automobile Association of Britain. There's also a Royal Automobile Club (RAC), but I couldn't find anything about it using the search engine at AA.

AA
Average Audience. A broadcast-industry variable whose value is a number. The number is not a measure of audience intelligence, average or otherwise.

AA
Double-A. When letters are used to indicate sizes, as in shoe or brassiere sizes, it is necessary to select an appropriate range. As time passes, if the system is successful, it often occurs that the customer base begins to include individuals outside the original range. Since A typically refers to the smallest size (or ends up doing so), something must be done. Hence, AA electric batteries, AA shoes, and AA cup sizes. (Sometimes this repeated-letter scheme is used even though a single-letter scheme is possible. For an example of this puzzling and inexplicable phenomenon, see the grade inflation entry.) Batteries are available down to AAAA at least (vide 9V battery entry); I'm not sure about shoes and bras, but here's the latest information we have managed to uncover on bra sizes.

If shoulders are back in fashion and you're thinking about fixing up your old blouse but can't find the right-size shoulder pad in the ``Home Fashions'' section, experiment with bra cups. This reminds me of the scene in the movie theater from Summer of '42. Now let's get back to...

This just in (from Reuters, dateline May 2003, Taipei): ``Villagers in southern Taiwan are strapping bras to their faces to guard against the deadly SARS virus due to a shortage of surgical masks.'' A local factory is actually recycling its own colorful bras, cutting them and sewing on new straps. I don't understand why the factory has to cut anything to begin: don't they have a supply of cups or something? I should probably say that I will be following this story as closely as is decently possible, but I won't.

The first sports bra was invented in 1977 by Lisa Lindahl, a jogger, and her childhood friend Polly Smith, a costume designer. Lisa's sister dubbed the project ``a jockstrap for women.'' While Lisa and Polly were working on a prototype, Lisa's husband came in and playfully pulled a jockstrap over his head and around his chest. They were inspired, and Polly fashioned a model constructed of two jock straps sewn together. (The story here is condensed from this page.) From (the general vicinity of) athletic cups to bra cups, and from bra cups to shoulder pads, it seems fashion moves ever upwards. The German word for glove is Handschuh (yes, literally `hand shoe').

In the US in 1999, 130,000 women underwent breast augmentation surgery, a factor-of-four increase from 1992, the year that silicone implants were banned for cosmetic use. (In November 2006 the FDA reapproved them for all uses where saline implants were approved.) To any mathematically competent person, it had already been clear in 1992 that silicone implants are just as safe as saline implants, but people are stupid about statistics. Silicone is also more natural-looking unless there's a leak. (If saline leaks, it's absorbed.) During the dark ages (1992 to 2006) silicone remained legal to replace a failed saline implant and in certain other applications. Also, the shell that holds the saline solution in saline implants is made of silicone, meaning that most of the time, the total surface area of living tissue exposed to silicone is the same whether the prosthesis contains saline or silicone.

But you know, those implants require more upkeep than the sealed battery on my old Honda, and they don't necessarily last much longer. Research has been ongoing; alternatives studied have included polyvinylpurolidone (PVP) implants and reconstruction using fat from elsewhere in the body. (I guess moving it from the wrong places to the right places kills two birds with one stone. Liposuction is gaining in popularity too, you know.) Last I heard, the clinical trials were being conducted in Europe, where the litigation risk is lower. Apparently the only alternative that has been widely commercialized is the gummy-bear implant, which is an incremental modification of the regular silicone implant: the filling is silicone polymerized with more crosslinking monomers, resulting in a rubbery gel rather than a viscous one.

Sixty percent of women getting augmentation in 1999 were aged 19-34. Thirty-five percent were aged 35-50. (The other 5% includes about 1% under 18.) Often the augmentation is to achieve symmetry or for prosthetic purposes after other surgery. A smaller number of women go under the knife to decrease their size.

Dr. Judith Reichman, regular guest physician on the Today Show, wants you please to understand that ``Very few women do it [get augmented, that is] to please a male figure in their lives. When we say that, we are under-valuing a woman's concerns.'' It's not about that at all! It's about looking good in clothes or looking good out of them. As you know, women dress for other women. Men don't matter. Women engage in competitive dressing -- that's what public events are for.

[A brief shot of realism: an ad (noticed 1993 or earlier) for Bodyslimmers once included this text: ``While you don't necessarily dress for men, it doesn't hurt, on occasion, to see one drool like the pathetic dog that he is.'' I guess this is aiming low.]

There was something relevant in the December 2006 issue of Psychology Today. (That should have set off your BS monitor, of course, so you won't be perturbed that the article contradicts Reichman's PC pieties.) It was an article by Marcelo Balive on page 19 (in the INSIGHTS section; you may find it helpful to raise the trip level on your BS monitor) entitled ``A Model Society: South America's Obsession with Plastic Surgery.'' More than half of the article's real estate is taken up by a very informative illustration of Miss Venezuela 2005 Monica Spear apparently literally disrobing. Color caption: ``Latin Americans have won 11 of the last 25 Miss Universe titles.'' In the booooody of the article: ``Although no official statistics are compiled, Argentina is among the top-ranked countries in per capita rates of cosmetic surgery, says Guillermo Flaherty, president of the Argentine plastic surgeons' association.'' The article ends with the recollection of an American woman who had recently lived in Argentina: her gym's locker room was an exhibition hall of breast implants. It reminds me of an American I knew who spent his last year of high school in England (ca. 1979). He was the only one circumcised. I mean, he was the only one who was circumcised. I mean he, oh never mind. He said he felt like an alien -- which, of course, he was.

In theater seating, X, Y, Z may be followed by AA, BB, CC. I'll have to check next time, if I arrive before the lights dim. Dang! I was at an amphitheater that seated eight hundred, and the top row was K. I'm going to have to choose more popular events.

The desire to look good in clothes, and not for a male figure in one's life, is sometimes called the ``Academy Awards Effect.'' Another Academy Awards effect is that the stars who attend them are often too poor (in money) or not poor enough (in judgment) to buy the million-dollar jewelry and hundred-thou duds they wear there. Those're on loan from jewelers and fashion designers, who sell them to less or more poor customers who only wish they were movie stars. See the AD entry for more on the male figure.

AA also occurs in a kind of positional numbering scheme based on letters. These differ from ordinary positional systems (such as the decimal system, say) because there's no zero. In this kind of numbering, or labeling, X, Y, Z are followed by AA, AB, AC, .... Ordered lists can be numbered using this scheme in HTML (see our example), as well as nroff and troff.

aa
Rough, cindery lava. Aa is often found lying loosely on the smooth surface of a Scrabble® board. All three major Scrabble dictionaries accept it and its plural aas.

The term was adopted by geologists (C.E. Dutton in the first place, in 1883) from the Hawaiian language. (Geologists like to do that. They adopted cwm from Welsh, when they could have used an English cognate like coomb. Obviously, geologists are closet Scrabble freaks.) In the original Hawaiian, this (aa, not cwm) is spelled a'a. In Hawaiian, Hawaii is spelled Hawai'i. That apostrophe represents a glottal stop consonant, something like the sound that substitutes for intervocalic /t/ in Cockney as well as in some words (e.g., cotton) in much of the US. The name of the capital of Yemen (.ye) -- Sana'a -- has a similar sound.

I wonder if a'a didn't get its name from the sound people make when they try to walk over it barefoot. Then it would be an onomatopoeia'a. No wait, don't blame me, I didn't make it up, honest! Apparently the opportunity to neologize with as many as four or more consecutive vowels overcomes all restraint. See this posting by David Lupher (to the famous classics list) for other examples.

Much nicer stuff than aa is pahoehoe, which has a smooth, lined surface that looks like thick rope or driftwood. It gets this appearance from the cooling process: the surface cools and begins to harden while the interior is still fluid. As the interior moves and drags the surface along with it, the outer surface is stretched, giving rise to the lines. This is possible only if the interior is not very viscous, so it continues to flow even when it is close to solidifying. The smoothness of the surface is also a consequence of the low viscosity (equivalently, the high fluidity): surface tension acts to smooth exposed surfaces, and is most effective when it has to overcome a smaller rather than a larger viscous resistance. Another difference, again consistent with the viscosity trend, is that aa tends to come in larger blocks, while pahoehoe is thin (and fast-moving while molten, get out of there!).

The difference in viscosity that determines whether aa or pahoehoe will form corresponds to a slight difference in silica content, and a single eruption can produce both (usually pahoehoe precedes aa). High silica content (60%) gives a viscous magma and aa. Because the high viscosity prevents gases from escaping easily, this is associated with explosive volcanoes like Mount St. Helens. Magmas with low silica content (50%), like those of Hawaiian island volcanoes, are more fluid and less explosive. That's why the Hawaiians have lots of cool-looking (or hot) pahoehoe.

AAA
Abbreviations And Acronyms. Well, I've seen at least one instance of this usage.

AAA
Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm[s]. The two main methods of repair are open repair and endovascular repair (EVAR).

AAA
Against All Authority. A South Florida punk band whose logo is a parody of the automobile-club AAA's.

AAA
Age Anaesthesia Association. ``[A]n association of anaesthetists with an interest in the anaesthetic problems of the elderly, under the auspices of the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland [AABGI].''

See also John Ascah's Aged Anaesthesia page.

AAA
Aging Active Adult.

AAA
Agricultural Adjustment { Act | Administration }. A New Deal project to limit agricultural overproduction. Some of its more controversial methods were plowing under crops instead of harvesting them, and slaughtering livestock and discarding the carcasses.

AAA
Air Avenue of Approach. Aviation acronym. Duh.

AAA
Always Add Acid. Mnemonic for the lab safety prescription: when mixing strong acid or acid anhydride with water, (slowly) pour the acid into the water, rather than the other way around. Another mnemonic, which works better with rhotacizing and derhotacizing accents, is ``Do like you oughta, add acid to water.''

AAA
Alternating Aerobic-Anoxic. Refers to wastewater processing systems. AAA systems are used to remove nitrogen from sludge that has it in the form of both ammonium [(NH4)+] and nitrate [(NO3)-] ions. I write ``used'' above, but perhaps I should write ``promoted,'' ``studied and proposed,'' or ``meant.'' Everything I've read about AAA systems describes studies of laboratory systems or modeling of proposed systems, and control or comparison systems are typically described as ``conventional activated-sludge systems.''

AAA
Amateur Astronomers Association of NY.

AAA
American Academy of Addictionology.

The presence of the above name in this glossary does not imply an endorsement of that last word. The presence of the acronym does not imply an endorsement of the entity, of whose existence, happily, little sign appears to remain on the internet. This page by Steven Barrett, M.D., provides some interesting information on Jay Holder, perpetrator of addictionology seminars, president and cofounder of American College of Addictionology and Compulsive Disorders (ACACD), graduate of assorted non-accredited quackery mills, and apparent inventor of ``torque-release technique.'' Jay Holder is a legitimate holder of a DC degree from National College of Chiropractic, which might say something about that degree. (For some reason, perhaps including the esteem in which the word chiropractic is held, that college has taken a new name.)

The word ``addictionology'' has come to be widely used. It may well be that some nonquacks use it.

AAA
American Academy of Audiology. Funny, I never heard of them.

AAA
American Allergy Association.

They're not trying to promote it.

AAA
American Anthropological Association. Founded 1902, became a constituent society of the ACLS in 1930. ACLS has an overview.

AAA
American Arbitration Association.

AAA
American Association of Anatomists.

AAA
American Athletic Association. Yes, yes, there are indeed Amateur Athletic Associations as well as American Athletic Associations, but there used to be an organization called simply the American Athletic Association.

AAA
American Automobile Association. No one says ``Ay Ay Ay.'' It's ``triple-ay.''

AAA
Anesthesia Administration Assembly. Not a mechanical device, but an assembly within the context of the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA). Founder and first president is Edward L. King, FACMPE.

AAA
Animal Acupuncture Academy. It's about humans performing acupuncture on animals, not the other way around. Veterinary acupuncture. In this context, those who do acupuncture on humans are called human acupuncturists, which under the circumstances is clear enough.

AAA
Animal-Assisted Activities. Human activities assisted by animals, like eating beef. No? Oh, I get it: seeing-eye dog, hearing-ear dog, fox-hunting. (Cf. AAT.)

Actually, fox-hunting almost doesn't qualify, because the hounds do all the work of pursuing the fox and killing and eating it (except for the comb, mask, and pads, of course). It might be called a human-assisted activity, since a human (the master of the hounds or his assistant) trains and may otherwise assist the hounds -- by, for example, sealing off before the hunt some foxholes that the fox might try to escape to. (They say there are no atheists in foxholes? How could they be sure?) But it is animal-assisted, in fact, because in the classic English fox hunt, the human activity is trying to keep up with the hounds, and horses assist in this activity by carrying the humans as they perform it. That's how I see it, anyway.

Seeing-eye dog work is the only AAA I have even the slightest direct experience of. One day on the main ASU campus, I saw a man a few yards ahead of me, standing patiently before a chain-link fence that closed off part of the sidewalk. A dense traffic of students was flowing around him. I came up and said ``...your dog stopped because they tore up the sidewalk.'' ``Can you lead me around it?'' ``Sure. How does it work?'' ``Just talk to me, and the dog will follow you.'' So we did that, and as I described our surroundings it turned out that we almost immediately overshot his next turn.

The dog's behavior surprised me, because the section of sidewalk closed off was only about four feet in diameter. The street had negligible traffic (it was sealed off by a card-entry gate) and one could actually continue by walking along the curb or by going only slightly off the sidewalk on the side away from the street. The dog could easily see how to go around, but was apparently trained not to take that initiative. (I wondered whether the dog conceived the task in terms of a destination and a preferred path, or in terms of an unmotivated sequence of specified paths.) On the other hand, the dog was expected to respond appropriately to its perception of the owner's social interactions. I guess I'm not surprised if dogs are better at understanding social interactions than pedestrian traffic. Still, for a long time afterwards I was haunted by the idea that I might have retrained the dog to overshoot the next turn and then do a dog-leg to get back to it.

The training of a seeing-eye dog has elements resembling the design of an interactive computer program. So many possible inputs! So many failure modes! Actually, the main resemblance to programming is that it rarely works correctly the first time. Both must be debugged or whatever. I gather from what I've read that part of the training involves focusing on isolated situations (e.g., how to exit a bus). So that would be like teaching ``methods.'' It seems that at least the terminology of OOP is a better fit to dog training than to programming. It typically takes about three years to program a new pup into a seeing-eye dog (a/k/a guide dog).

I remember reading a news item some years back, maybe around 2000, about a seeing-eye dog that was abused by its owner and that killed him by leading him into the path of an oncoming vehicle. The dog survived, so I recall. This story has its improbabilities, and it resembles a widely retold joke (in which both dog and owner survive) that you can find on the Internet. I've checked Lexis-Nexis and Google (News, Web, and Blogs) with a variety of search strings, and I've failed to turn up the story. You can take it for what it may be worth: either I have an extremely retentive memory for obscure and evanescent news stories, or I'm a highly creative author of fiction without even knowing it.

Here's another kind of AAA that I'm not very familiar with: picking up members of the apposite sex. I remember, or at least I think I remember, that Freud mentioned this somewhere. He referenced the idea that prostitutes were well-known to walk their dogs, as a way to start conversations with prospective customers. I was a child when I read this; perhaps there was also the idea that walking a dog excused what might otherwise be loitering. You could look it up, I suppose, by reading enough of Freud's works. (There's a list of the ones you can skip below.) Anyway, I was reminded of this by an AFP news item on July 31, 2008: ``Saudi bans sale of pet dogs and cats.''

The previous day, according to the report, Othman Al Othman, head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Riyadh, known as the Muttawa, told the Saudi edition of the Al Hayat daily that the commission had started enforcing an old religious edict against selling pet cats and dogs or exercising them in public. The reason for reviving the enforcement of this edict was an alleged rising fashion among some men of using pets in public to make passes at women and disturb families. No further explanation was offered. It seemed that the new enforcement of the old edict might be restricted to Riyadh only, but one never knows.

Here is a list of the works of Freud for which I can easily find complete etexts (mostly Gutenberg) in English or German. The observation mentioned above doesn't appear to be in any of these.

AAA
Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology (Liverpool).

AAA
Anti-Aircraft Artillery. Also AA. The most common sense of AAA in military usage. See ack-ack. I heard a troop (that would be the singular, right?) interviewed by CNN pronounce this ``triple-Ay.''

AAA
Archives of Asian Art. ``Archives of Asian Art is a journal of the Asian Society, one of the world's foremost institutions dedicated to building bridges of understanding between Americans and Asians. It provides information and insights about Asia and the Pacific, and offers fresh perspectives on the forces and issues that are shaping Asia's relations with the United States and the rest of the world.'' Published once per year, and an annual subscription costs WOW! I mean, where WOW is 55 euros in the EU and 58 euros in the ROW.

AAA
Area Agency on Aging. Uh, yeah, could you have a look at my knee area? See n4a.

AAA
Association of Authors' Agents. An industry organization in the UK, for collective discussion and representation. Agents must be three years in the business before they can join. (This business of establishing membership thresholds seems to be a book-industry thing. In the US, PEN has a threshold for prospective writer-members. In contrast, to join the typical scientific membership society, you mostly just need a couple of current members to vouch for you.)

If you're a writer looking for an agent, try the Writers' Guild of Great Britain (this link may be more robust), the SoA, or the ALCS. The US organization corresponding to the AAA is the AAR. More general discussion of agent associations there.

AAA
Australian Automobile Association. ``The official voice of motoring in Australia since 1924... represents'' six state-wide motoring organizations and one each for the Sydney area and the Northern Territory.

aaa
Autos, Avus, Attraktionen. (Berlin.)

AAA
Triple-A. A size smaller than AA, q.v.

AAAA
Amateur Athletic Association of America.

AAAA
American Academy of Anesthesiologist Assistants.

AAAA
American Association for Advertising Agencies. ``Four A's.''

Selected Letters of James Thurber, p. 209, has a letter of August 15, 1959, rejecting a request for Thurber to participate in some project of the A.A.A.A. While he pleads ill health and lack of time, his contempt for the organization is not entirely concealed. He seems to go off on a tangent:

... Youngsters now bring babble boxes for me to talk into, as we sink further and further into the new Oral Culture. The written word will soon disappear and we'll no longer be able to read good prose like we used to could. This prospect does not gentle my thoughts or tranquil me toward the future.

    Thanks anyway and I hope those creative spirits learn how to get through to people the literate way.
AAAA
American Association for Affirmative Action. They're in favor of it. See also the CCRI entry.

AAAA
The American Association of Amateur Astronomers. (Here's an alternate link.)

AAAA
Quad-A. A size smaller than AAA. Vide AA entry for yet more profound enlightenment. Some nine-volt batteries are packages of six series-wired 1.5V AAAA batteries.

AAAAA
American Association Against Acronym Abuse.

AAAAAA
Association for the Abolition of Abused Abbreviations and Asinine Acronyms. [Like maybe A7NHY (Aaaaaaardvark No homepage yet). Cf. TLA.] Considerably older than...

AAAAAA
Association for the Alleviation of Absurd Acronyms and Asinine Abbreviations. An international organization ``to tax and control the proliferation of initials'' so we don't choke on our alphabet soup. Proposed in The Economist, in a tongue-in-cheek article entitled ``AA (acronyms anonymous)'' [issue of Dec. 11, 1999]. Amelioration or Abatement would have been better words than Alleviation.

As of January 5, 2004, there were 85 entries whose head terms included the letter A and no other letter. Oh sure, we could expand this number considerably, but we're very selective. Cf. AAAAAA.

AAAAI
American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. See also FAN.

AAAASF
American Association for Accreditation of Ambulatory Surgery Facilities. ``A voluntary program of inspection and accreditation in surgery facilities to ensure excellence and quality care to patients.'' The October 2001 symposium in Dallas was cancelled. See also AAAC and AAAHC.

AAABEM
American Association of Acupuncture and Bio-Energetic Medicine. Look, why don't you just buy yourself one of those copper bracelets? Convert the money you save into US dollar bills (while the mint still deigns to keep them in circulation) and put a few pictures of pyramids next to your hip.

AAAC
Academic Affirmative Action Committee.

AAAC
American Academy of Ambulatory Care. Related entries: AAAHC and AAAASF.

AAAC
Association of Accrediting Agencies of Canada -- Association des agences d'agrément du Canada. ``To ensure the highest[-]quality education of professionals, the Association of Accrediting Agencies of Canada pursues excellence in standards and processes of accreditation.'' Corresponds to ASPA in US.

AAACN
American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nursing. Cf. AAAC.

AAACRR
Maybe you have in mind A3CR2.

AAAD
American Athletic Association of the Deaf. Old name of the USADSF.

AAAD
Asian Academy of Aesthetic Dentistry. It doesn't have any very obvious official website, even as of late 2008.

The official publication of the AAAD is the Asian Journal of Aesthetic Dentistry, published in Singapore. Articles are in English, and the first volume was published in 1993. The AAAD holds a general meeting biennially; with the first meeting apparently in 1990.

AAAE
American Association for Adult Education.

AAAE
Archives of American Aerospace Exploration. ``[F]ounded by the Digital Library and Archives of the University Libraries of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in April of 1986. Its purpose is to find, preserve, and make available to researchers collections of correspondence, notes, photographs, written or recorded reminiscences, memorabilia, oral histories, as well as any other items that document American aeronautical and space history.'' Hint: not just any reminiscences. Don't call with recollections of your own first flight unless it was so interesting that you got killed. ``The AAAE seeks such collections from pilots, astronauts, researchers in industry and academia, NASA administrators and project managers, and any others who have played a part in the development of United States aerospace history.''

AAAE
Association for the Advancement of Arts Education. ``The AAAE is the direct result of a comprehensive two-year study which surveyed hundreds of superintendents, principals, teachers, parents, school board members, artists, professional arts administrators and community leaders regarding their views on arts education. The study found a positive element for change in arts education priorities and programs in the Cincinnati area.''

AAAH
American Association of Alternative Healers. God help us! -- sometimes literally. Cf. AQA.

AAAHA
American Amateur Arabian Horse Association.

AAAHA
Ann Arbor Amateur Hockey Association.

AAAHB
Reserve this letter sequence now! Five-letter sequences in this desirable region of the dictionary are going fast! Contact the initialism registry today!

AAAHC
Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care. Ambulatory health care: treating the walking pneumonia (and the boogy-woogy blues). Hence, an alternate expansion: A -- A -- AH -- Choo!

Cf. Achoo! -- The Medical Search Engine. (Gesundheit!)

Related entries: AAAC and AAAASF.

AAAHD
Associação dos Amigos do Arquivo Histórico-Diplomático do Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros (MNE). Portuguese `Association of the friends of the historical diplomatic archive of the ministry of foreign businesses.'

AAAI
American Association for Artificial Intelligence. AAAI homepage had a nice, understated background texture, and very intelligently included the URL address of the AAAI homepage. AI is a fast-paced field, however, and all that has changed. Founded in 1979.

AAAL
American Association of Applied Linguistics.

The AAAL passed resolutions opposing ballot initiatives in California and Arizona to end the ghettoization of Hispanic students in bilingual education programs, although that isn't exactly the way the AAAL sees it.

AAALAC
American Association for the Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care. Created by the ACP in 1965 to test the waters of the Aardvark region of name space. Alack and alas, deciding not to go the whole three consecutive A's, ACP changed its name to AALAS in 1967.

AAALF
American Association for Active Lifestyles and Fitness. One of six national associations within the AAHPERD.

AAAM
Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine. Committed to squeezing your lemon back into shape. Ohnowait -- I should have visited the website first. It turns out they want to decrease the risk of injuries and fatalities. One way to do that: cancel the 45th Annual Meeting, in San Antonio, Texas, originally scheduled for September 23-26, 2001. No final decision on whether to reschedule had been made when I first wrote in this entry on October 9, 2001, but it was eventually held in that city on October 24-26, 2001.

The AAAM was founded in 1957 ``by the Medical Advisory Committee to the Sports Car Club of America by six practicing physicians whose avocation was motor racing.''

AAANA
American Academy of Ambulatory Nursing Administration. For nursing administrators who are on their feet, so far as I know -- no webpage yet. Next time I'm in Pitman, New Jersey, I'll be sure to walk over and ask. Hmmm... there're some names -- AAAASF, AAAC, AAAHC -- in which ``ambulatory'' doesn't modify ``administration.'' Oh! Now I get it!

AAAO
The Alliance of Arkansas Animal Organizations. ``God Bless the Animals, America, and the World.''

Bring back Eric Burdon.

AAAOM
American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. (No ``other'' in the name.) Aaah: om.

AAAP
American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. It's got a snappy jingle -- let's go back again! The ABPN offers certification in the subspecialty of addiction psychiatry.

AAAP
American Association of Avian Pathologists. The pathologies, not the pathologists, are avian. On the other hand, the rhinovirus flu that peaks each Winter uses domestic-animal hosts that include not just mammals (especially pigs) but also fowl (ducks and chickens). Actually, the important nonhuman host population is supposed to be in Asia, so for my purposes they're foreign domestic animals.

AAAP
Asian-Australasian Association of Animal Production Societies. Never ``AAAPS'' or ``AAAAP.''

AAAPP
American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology. The AAAPP has an eponymous mailing list.

AAAS
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780. Membership by invitation only. Society's journal named after the Telemachus of James Joyce's Ulysses.

A constituent society of the ACLS since 1919. ACLS has an overview.

AAAS
American Association for the Advancement of Science. ``Triple-Ay Ess'' was founded in 1848. Membership by invitation: anyone who can pay the dues is invited to join. I wonder what it takes to become a Fellow. They publish one of the various magazines that have the title Science.

AAAS
Austrian Association for American Studies, founded in 1975. A constituent association of the EAAS. ``AAAS'' is the standard abbreviation, but their name is also (or officially?) Österreichische Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien.

The current (early 2004) officers of the AAAS are distributed among an Institut für Amerikanistik (`Institute for Americanistics') at Karl-Franzens-Universität in Graz, an Institut für Amerikastudien at Universität Innsbruck, and units called Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (* Englistics -- what a word! what a word!) in Salzburg, Klagenfurt, and Vienna. Recent AAAS conferences (including the EAAS conference 2000, held in Graz) have been in these cities. Why have you got a problem with this? It's a small country.

AAASP
Association for the Advancement of Applied Sports Psychology.

AAASS
American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, founded in 1948 for the purpose of publishing an American journal in the Slavic field; it was not a membership society until 1960. It grew out of the Committee on Slavic Studies, which was established by the ACLS in 1938, and the AAASS did not itself become a constituent society of the ACLS until 1984. ACLS has an overview.

According to itself, AAASS is a ``nonprofit, nonpolitical, scholarly society which is the leading private organization dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about Russia, Central Eurasia, and Eastern and Central Europe.''

As it happens, not everyone in these areas is a Slav, so the statement constitutes a political, nonscholarly statement that does not advance knowledge. People who think you can't please everybody are optimists; you can't please anybody.

AAAST/APAST
African Association for the Advancement of Science and Technology / Association africaine pour l'avancement des sciences et techniques.

AAB
Allergiker- und Asthmatiker-Bund. (Germany.) Interesting that English lacks a shorter word for ``Allergy-sufferer'' when it has words like hypoallergenic.

AAB
American Association of Bioanalysts.

AABA
American Anorexia Bulimia Association.

AABB
American Association of Blood Banks. ``Advancing Transfusion and Cellular Therapies Worldwide.'' Hemocyte therapy by phone? Cool! Taking ``outpatient'' to the next level!

AABB
Axis-Aligned Bounding Box. For a graphic object. AABB's (or AABB'ss, if you get into the rhythm of the thing) are used in video games. The rest of this entry is fairly obvious.

Not infrequently, video games involve one or more moving images representing objects, and often it is necessary to determine whether a collision appears to occur between such objects -- i.e., whether certain regions of different images overlap. This collision detection becomes computationally expensive as the borders of the regions become complex. A first step in the process is to define AABB's. For 2D graphics, AABB's bounding rectangles aligned with the screen axes for moving objects and for any objects, moving or not, that they might collide with. (In 3D, AABB's are the natural generalization: right rectangular prisms aligned with, you know, whatever. This is very obvious, but I just like to use ``right rectangular prism'' instead of ``cuboid.'') rectangles needn't be minimal, and for a sprite (loosely, for an object represented by different images at different times), it can be efficient to use a single AABB rather than a time-varying one. It is easy to check for collisions between AABB's.

If AABB's don't overlap, no collision has occurred and no further collision detection is needed. The cheaper the game, the faster the object movement, or the faster the game development, the likelier it is that AABB collisions will be treated as equivalent to object collisions.

The <realtimerendering.com> website has a page with a comprehensive list of links to resources for computing the intersection of many simple objects, including AABB's. As of late June 2017, it was updated just a couple of months ago.

AABH
Association of Ambulatory Behavior Healthcare. ``A powerful forum for people engaged in providing Mental Health Services.''
``Promoting the evolution of flexible models of responsive cost-effective ambulatory behavioral healthcare.''

Based in Alexandria, Virginia -- conveniently close to the nation's capital.

AABIC
The Association for the Advancement of Brain Injured Children. (``Brain Injured'' here refers to something more severe than an impaired facility for inserting hyphens in attributive phrases requiring them.) AABIC is an organization in the state of Western Australia that is a ``support group for families who have a family member undertaking a rehabilitation treatment programme. The Association also provides equipment, library facilities, incontinence pad scheme and family support officers.''

AABP
American Academy of Behavioral Psychology. Now the AACBP.

AABP
American Association of Bovine Practitioners.

It's good to have a ready comeback when she says ``You're such an animal!'' Cf. AASP.

AABS
Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. Founded 1968, became a constituent society of the ACLS in 1991. ACLS has an overview.

AABSS
American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences. ``[A]n interdisciplinary professional society designed to serve faculty and administrators at four-year colleges and universities. The annual meeting offers a collegial forum for participants to share research, ideas for professional development, and academic concerns in all areas of the Behavioral and Social Sciences. Student participation is encouraged.''

AABT
Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy. Now the ABCT.

AABW
AntArctic Bottom Water.

AAC
Agriculture et Agroalimentaire Canada. AAFC en anglais.

AAC
American Anglican Council. The AAC and the ACN are two American Anglican organizations similarly dedicated to ``biblical authority, the Great Commission and the historic faith and order of Anglicanism.'' The AAC is trying to reform (i.e., undo recent reforms of) the Episcopal Church (ECUSA); the ACN is trying to build a lifeboat in case AAC fails and the ECUSA sinks.

You know, I'm really impressed with the passion, dedication, and faith of these, um, zealots, errr, re-reforming crusaders, err, whatever. I'm considering burning in hell for eternity so that they can be right.

AAC
Amperes AC. Term parallel to ADC and VAC.

AAC
Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. A journal published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), but of greater interest for pharmacology than for microbiology as such.

AAC
Asia-Africa Conference. This conference, held in 1955, was so important that the name is normally spelled out, so that it is not confused with all of the many other AAC's with which context might allow it to be confused. (AAC? AAC?) In fact, David E. Hall's African Acronyms and Abbreviations: A Handbook, only lists AAC, AAC, AAC, and AAC. All that mutually validating bellyaching led to the formation of the NAM.

AAC
Association of American Colleges. Now known as the AACU.

AAC
ATM Access Concentrator. Interfaces legacy system to ATM.

AAC
The Audiology Awareness Campaign.

AACA
American Association of Certified Appraisers. Has members throughout the English-speaking parts of North America.

AAcA
Australian ACupuncture Association. Earlier name of the Australian Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine Association (AACMA). It would have been pretty interesting if the Australian aborigines had independently developed acupuncture medicine. It could have been called puncturango.

AACAP
American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

The University of Michigan used to host a site for AACAP, and still has a useful page.

AACAR
Association for the Advancement of Central Asian Research.

AACBP
American Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology. Previously the AABP. See also ABCT.

Just offhand, I'd have to say that <americanacademyofbehavioralpsychology.org> is the longest domain name I can recall.

AACC
Airport Associations Coordinating Council.

AACC
Alburtis Area Community Center. Alburtis in Pennsylvania.

AACC
All Africa Conference of Churches. You can't get any web content until you choose English or français (for CETA) on the start page. For a moment, I thought it was the All Africa Conference of Canadians.

AACC
The American Association for Clinical Chemistry.

AACC
The American Association for Contamination Control. The existence of an organization with this initialism and expansion is alleged in a few glossaries and one of that putative organization's standards is even referred to in a .com page, but I have my doubts.

AACC
American Association of Cereal Chemists.

AACC
American Association of Community Colleges. Holds its annual convention in April.

AACC
Anne Arundel Community College. Anne Arundel County is in Maryland. ``Anne Arundel'' is pronounced there as a single word with primary stress on the third syllable and secondary stress on the initial syllable. The county, founded in 1650, was named for the wife of Cecil Baltimore, the second Lord Baltimore.

The county seat of Anne Arundel County is Annapolis, which was settled in 1649 by Puritans who had fled Virginia. They originally called their settlement Providence. The Puritan town successfully revolted against the Roman Catholic government of Maryland in the 1655 battle of the Severn River, but lost its independence after the English Restoration. In 1694 the settlement, which had come to be known as Anne Arundel Town, became the provincial capital of Maryland and was renamed Annapolis in honor of Princess Anne. As Queen Anne in 1708, she granted the town its first charter.

Too little too late, I guess. On Oct. 19, 1774, Annapolis staged its own Tea Party (seems to have been a fad). Once Philadelphia was occupied by the British, the Continental Congress met in Annapolis, making it the effective US capital (all major cities were under British control). Sir Robert Eden, the last royal governeur of Maryland, lies buried in the graveyard of St. Anne's Church in Annapolis; he was an ancestor of the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Today Annapolis is best known for the US Naval Academy, founded in 1845.

Annapolis became the state capital after independence. Information on the city is offered by The Mining Company and by Covesoft.

The largest city in Maryland is Baltimore. Further Maryland information in this glossary can also be found at the MD entry.

AACCA
The American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Advisors.

AACCCM
Anglo-American Cataloguing Committee for Cartographic Materials.

AACCP
Asociación Argentina de Criadores de Caballos de Polo. `Argentine Association of Polo Pony Breeders.'

AACD
American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry. It's a member of the International Federation of Esthetic Dentistry, whose page for it explains that AACD ``is the largest international dental organization dedicated specifically to the art and science of cosmetic dentistry. Founded in 1984, the AACD has over 7600 members in the United States and in more than 60 countries around the globe. Members of the Academy include cosmetic and reconstructive dentists, dental laboratory technicians, corporations, educators, researchers, students, hygienists, and dental assistants.''

There's also an American Academy of Esthetic Dentistry. Go read the AAED entry. If you can figure out from that what the difference between aesthetic and cosmetic dentistry is, then you're a better man than I, unless you're a woman, in which case you're a better woman than I, even if you can't tell the difference (between aesthetic and cosmetic, of course).

AACDP
American Association of Chairs of Departments of Psychiatry.

Read it here now! (The rest of this entry will probably be transferred into a stool entry as soon as I feel like it.)

For me, the expansion of AACDP evokes an image of a warehouse piled high with four-legged instruments of discomfort. Which reminds me -- in German there is a word Stuhl meaning `stool.' It's cognate with the English word, of course. [It's pronounced something like ``shtool.'' The difference in the initial consonants reflects a regular sound shift that took place in German, and the similarity of the vowels represents luck, although there are other instances (e.g., cool and kuhl, shoe and Schuh, school and Schule).]

I find it interesting that the words stool and Stuhl, in addition to their principal meanings, both mean ``a unit of feces,'' not to put too fine a point on it. It's obviously an instance of metonymy, but the question is whether it is two instances of metonymy. In English the, um, let's call them eliminatory meanings, are plentiful, but the OED has no instances before 1410. The Grimm describes the instances of the corresponding senses in German as being since the fourteenth century [seit dem 14. jh], with the earliest specific instance dated to 1513. It looks as if it might have been borrowed, but both languages contain some intermediate meanings that explain the connection locally. For example, German has expressions corresponding to `go to the stool,' and English has many recorded instances of stool referring specifically to the stool in a certain little room. (And speaking of small enclosed spaces, the German cognate of stove, Stube, means room -- as in bedroom.)

The proverbial use of stool, in expressions like ``falling between two stools,'' is also paralleled quite precisely in German with Stuhl, but this figurative use doesn't strike me as needing to be borrowed.

AACE
American Association for Cancer Education. Just what we needed: smarter cancers. Oh well, maybe if they go to college they won't reproduce so much. The AACE publishes JCE jointly with the EACE.

AACE
American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. ``The Voice of Clinical Endocrinology® - Founded 1991.''

It reminds me of Einstein's comment about ``hormones of general circulation.''

AACE
AOBA Apartment Community Excellence (award).

AACI
Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel. An immigrants' support organization, founded 1951.

AACM
Afro-Asian Common Market. I found this in the New Japanese-English Dictionary of Economic Terms (The Oriental Economist, 1977). A search of the web suggests that this entity exists only as a vague proposal. The only web instances of the name where it was not clear that AACM does not exist were in Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries. At least the Japanese is consistent, using kanji for kyoudou shijou (`common market') and katakana transliterations for Asia and Africa (ajia and afurika). These are not ad hoc transliterations: the English words have been adopted in Japanese, but borrowings that have occurred recently (i.e., in the last few centuries) are written in the katakana syllabary (rather than in the hiragana syllabary used for native words). It's something like the use of italics in English to indicate young adoptions like naïve. A borderline case would be the word tempura, derived from Portuguese tempero (`spice, seasoning') in the sixteenth century and now sometimes written in hiragana. Nihon Kokugo Daijiten (Shogakukan) lists tempura (te-n-pu-ra) in katakana.

The same twenty-volume dictionary lists arigato (a-ri-ga-to-u, English: `thank you') in hiragana. There's a good reason for this. Although it is widely thought that arigato is a borrowing of the Portuguese obrigato (cognate of English 'obliged'), it clearly is not. There are recorded instances of arigato from before Portuguese contact, and the Japanese would more likely have been something like o-bu-ri-ga-to. In fact, the etymology of arigato is known, follows regular Grimm's-Law-type rules for Japanese, and is encoded in the two-kanji way of writing the word. (See the 2001 discussion on the Linguist List, summarized in this posting.)

Kyoudou (`common, general') is also written kyodo -- the o's are long, and in a strict version of the Hepburn system I think they require macrons. One of the girls' names that is transliterated Yoko is written with hiragana characters for yo-o-ko, but I've never seen it transliterated (as would be appropriate, just as with kyodo) as ``Youko.'' Probably too confusing.

Shijou (or shijo) has various of the noun senses of the English word market, but common market is also sometimes rendered by the somewhat pleonastic kyoudou doumei (doumei is `union, confederation').

AACMA
Australian Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine Association. Previously known as the Australian Acupuncture Association (AAcA).

AACN
American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology. The AACN initialism seems to be a heavily contested namespace region within the health professions. Considering that this organization represents clinical neuropsychologists in both the US and Canada, they might have called it the Academy of American and Canadian Neuropsychologists. Wouldn't that have worked out better?

AACN
American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

AACN
American Association of Critical-Care Nurses.

AACP
American Academy of Cardiovascular Perfusion. Visit the website to hear a medley of patriotic tunes.

AACP
American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists. ``The American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists was founded in 1975 by George Winokur MD and others (including many of his students). They shared the belief that a wealth of clinically relevant data is available in every psychiatrist's personal practice experience. The organization was created to provide a forum to share information for psychiatrists engaged in direct patient care; and to keep abreast of the latest scientific developments relevant to the practice of psychiatry.''

AACP
American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.

AACP
American Association of Community Psychiatrists. Hey -- it takes a village. Okay, that was just a joke. Here's the official scoop: ``The Mission of AACP is to inspire, empower, and equip Community Psychiatrists to promote and provide quality care and to integrate practice with policies that improve the well being of individuals and communities.'' My gawd -- they really do want to treat the community!

AACR
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. This was not a single standard but at least two: an American and a British version. The current version (as of 2003) is AACR2R.

AACRAO
American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

AACR1
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 1st edition. This abbreviation started to be used when AACR2 appeared. As such, it's a retronym (and an acronym, but not a backronym). Each update lengthens the acronym: AACR, AACR2, AACR2R... Seems to me we're overdue for ``AACR2R+.''

AACR2
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition. Promulgated in 1978. The same acronym is widely used for AACR2R, a revised version of this.

AACR2R
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition, 1988 revision, prepared under the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR; edited by Michael Gorman and Paul W. Winkler. (Ottawa: Canadian Library Association; London: Library Association; Chicago: American Library Association, 1988.) The current standard.

A very informative web page for a Monash University course explains:

``While the Editors are at pains to point out that it is not a 3rd Edition, some consider that it should have been called a 3rd Edition.''

AACR3
Not-so-fast there, dust boy!

AACSB
American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. Founded in 1916 to accredit schools of business. At some point, the acronym was temporarily sealed and AACSB was officially ``AACSB -- International Association for Management Education.'' In March 2003 I learned that they were giving out the expansion ``Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business,'' and as of 2013 the website uses ``AACSB International--The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.''

AACSB accredits 672 business schools world-wide as of June 2013; a bit over 500 of those are in the US and Canada. I admire the deft maneuver by which they eased the obsolete or undesired qualifier ``American'' out of the name. But they never replaced either A with ``Accreditation'' or a similar word. It seems that all the names beat around that bush. In the US, AACSB is in fact the premier accrediting organization for MBA programs. (Actually, they accredit the institution, so that, say, a management program in the industrial engineering department of an AACSB-accredited university may be part of the accreditation process. See this page for details.)

It may be that the absence of ``accreditation'' in the name prevents confusion of AACSB with the second-most prestigious B-school accreditation group, which is called the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP). The AACSB, ACBSP, and straggler IACBE can refer to themselves as the Association, the Council, and the Assembly without risk of confusion, little though the latter might mind. But that's probably not the intent.

Nota bene: Membership in the AACSB is not the same as accreditation by the AACSB. Some member schools describe themselves as candidates for accreditation.

AACSB is based in Tampa, Florida, and maintains an office in Singapore. Internationally, the three largest and most influential business-school accreditation associations are AACSB, AMBA (Association of MBAs, based in London), and EQUIS (European QUality Improvement System, based in Brussels). Writing about accreditation makes me groggy, so entries for AMBA and EQUIS will have to wait.

AACT
American Association of Community Theatre. (Sic.)

AACT
Apartment Association of Central Texas.

AACTE
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

AACU, AAC&U
Association of American Colleges and Universities. A generous source of empty educationist rhetoric. One of their projects is GEx.

From a faculty POV, this is an organization of administrative types who seek to wrest from faculty types the power to control curriculum, the method being to weaken and de-emphasize majors. So I've read, from third parties, anyway.

Hmmm, les'see here... I notice that the annual meeting of 2006 was held in conjunction with the American Conference of Academic Deans. The conference title was ``Demanding Excellence.''

The organization was established in 1915 as the Association of American Colleges (AAC) at a meeting of college presidents in Chicago. There were 179 founding member schools. It changed its name to the current one in 1995.

To judge from its website and publications, the organization itself prefers the initialism with an ampersand. In unofficial contexts, others generally use plain AACU.

AACVB
Asian Association of Convention and Visitor Bureaus.

AACVD
Aerosol-Assisted Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). Vide J. A. T. Norman and G. P. Pez, J. Chem. Soc., Chem. Comm., 971 (1991). Cf. Spray CVD: C. Roger, T. S. Corbitt, M. J. Hampden-Smith, T. T. Kodas, Appl. Phys. Lett. 65, 1021 (1994).

AAD
Access to Archival Databases. A nightmarishly badly catalogued ``system'' for retrieving files online from NARA, reportedly much better than the old alternatives, if you can imagine.

AAD
Allgemeiner Anlagedienst. (Germany.)

AAD
American Academy of Dermatology.

AAD
Analog-Analog-Digital. Audio CD's may be designated AAD, ADD, or DDD. The successive letters indicate whether analog or digital equipment was used in the respective stages of production: (1) original recording, (2) mixing and editing, (3) mastering (transcription).

AAD
Australian Association of the Deaf. ``The Australian Association of the Deaf Inc. is the national peak organisation for Deaf people in Australia. It represents the views of Deaf people who use Auslan (Australian Sign Language).''

AADA
Abbreviated Antibiotic Drug Application (to the FDA). As bacteria keep evolving greater immunity to existing antibiotics, we keep needing more new ones. Although bacteria reproduce asexually, they can exchange genetic material (this is relevant in attempts to trace the origin of diseases such as syphilis). Thus, immunity developed by one bacterium may spread to other bacteria. It is especially for this reason that long-term low-level administration of antibiotics to livestock as a growth enhancer is considered a dangerous incubator for immunity. Another use perceived to pose widespread risk is among drug addicts with tuberculosis (TB): TB has a long course, and someone not continuing to take antibiotics for the full term provides an opportunity for bacteria to evolve incremental increases in antibiotic resistance.

AADB
American Association of the Deaf-Blind.

AADE
American Association of Dental Editors. I really don't think you should put a comma after your canine.

AADE
American Association of Dental Examiners. Heck, I know how to do this. Open your mouth. Let me see...yes, yes, you have teeth. Founded in 1882, when this was probably a big deal. Now anyone can do it.

Mission Statement: ``To serve as a resource by providing a national forum for exchange, development and dissemination of information to assist dental regulatory boards with their obligation to protect the public.''

AADE
American Association of Diabetes Educators.

[column]

AADEC
Asociación Argentina de Estudios Clásicos. `Argentine Classical Studies Association.' A member of FIEC.

AADEP
American Academy of Disability Evaluating Physicians.

AADPRT
American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training. I imagine they didn't have to haggle to become owners of the <aadprt.org> domain.

AADS
American Association of Dental Schools. Now the ADEA.

AADT
Average Annual Daily Traffic. That's one official expansion, but it seems to mean the average daily traffic, determined by sampling or averaging over an entire year, which might be better expressed as Annual-Average Daily Traffic.

AAE
Affirmative Action Employer.

AAE
Alliance for Arts Education. Existed around 1976, anyway. I remember in grad school in the early 80's, my composer friend Lee explained that ``we'' (music people) didn't care about federal funding for the arts being reduced further: ``Nixon already cut us out.''

AAE
American Association of Endodontists. The E-word is calculated to minimize the terrifying thought of root-canal work.

AAEA
American Academy of Equine Art. They don't mean the art of being an equestrian.

AAEA
Alabama Art Education Association. ``[A] professional organization of art educators dedicated to advocating art education by following national standards, providing membership services, professional growth and leadership opportunities.''

AAEA
American Agricultural Economics Association.

AAEC
Advanced Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitor.

AAEC
AgChem Alliance for Electronic Communication. US and Canada agriculture-industry electronic-commerce action group. Working to put zebra codes on black-eyed peas, I think. The preponderance of web evidence suggests that the first A in AAEC stands for AgChem, but the successor organization's thumbnail history remembers it as just Ag.

The successor was RAPID, Inc. Details can be found quickly at our RAPID entry.

AAEC
Agricultur{e|al} and Applied EConomics. An academic department in some schools.

I visited the homepage of the Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics at Virginia Tech in 2003 and was invited to join in celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary. Eagerly, I followed their link to a history of the department, divided into the first thirty years, and the second thirty years. Uh... Oh, of course, that document is from 1997. Umm... Ah, clarification (inferred from intimations on pages six and seven): the department was founded in 1921, so in 1996 began its seventy-fifth year. Almost. Actually, VT has probably had agricultural economics faculty since 1921 (one that year), and a list of ``Course Requirements for First B. S. Degree Program in Agricultural Economics'' survives from 1924, although there was only one student. It was apparently an optional curriculum within the School of Business Administration. In 1927, a Department of Agricultural Economics was finally established within the School of Agriculture. Documents celebrating the 75th anniversary were scheduled to remain on the website until April 5, 2004. (Ah, what the heck -- leave it up.)

I have to say that we are so used to thinking of education in formalized and institutionalized terms that it is often surprising to return to the beginning and see how loosely things initially came together. Often the most important conceptions and intentions of the initial participants, and basic facts about entities and members, are lost in the recycle bin of history. The history of universities and colleges generally, dating back to the schools in Paris and Bologna at the end of the twelfth century, are similarly uncertain.

The sixty-year history also explains subsequent department name changes:

In 1929, rural sociologists were added to the faculty, and the name was changed to the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology. The rural sociology faculty were transferred to the new Department of Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1964, and the department's name was again changed to the Department of Agricultural Economics. To better describe the scope of department's work, the name was changed to the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics in 1993.

So perhaps the ``Agriculture and'' form is an unofficial variant. Whatever.

TTU has a Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, also (as at VT) abbreviated in course offerings as AAEC.

UGA has one too. Oh no! They want us to celebrate their 75th anniversary too: ``The Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Georgia celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2004. Professor William Firor organized and chaired the department in 1929.'' Ahh -- now that's the way to do it. Everyone should have such foresight.

Okay, I think I've made my point by now, whatever it was.

Incidentally, I think in most places AAEC is called informally ``Ag Econ.''

AAEC
Australian Atomic Energy Commission. In 1986, the AAEC was formally replaced by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).

AAEC
Avid-Authorized Education Centers. Avid Technology, Inc., offers ``Products for StoryTellers.'' It's so interesting that I'm sure you'll be happy to find out for yourself whatever it all is about.

AAED
American Academy of Esthetic Dentistry. A member of the International Federation of same (IFED, which it cofounded in 1994). According to IFED's page for AAED, ``[f]ounded in 1975, the American Academy of Esthetic Dentistry has members throughout the world. AAED's unique, multidisciplinary membership is comprised [sic, of course] of dentists in the following specialties: dental public health, endodontics, oral and maxiofacial surgery, orthodontics and dentofacial orthopedics, pediatric dentistry, periodontics and prosthodontics, along with general practitioners and certified dental technicians.'' Cf. AACD.

AAEE
Aeronautical and Aircraft Experimental Establishment. (British.)

AAEE
American Academy of Environmental Engineers.

AAEE
American Association for Employment in Education, Inc. They appear to be in favor of it.

Founded in 1934 as the National Institutional Teacher Placement Association. Teachers complain of lack of respect, but it doesn't help when the AAEE describes itself as ``comprised of colleges, universities, and school districts whose members are school personnel administrators and college and university career services officers.''

AAEE
American Association of Electromyography and Electrodiagnosis. Later became the AAEM.

AAEF
Aviation / Aerospace Education Foundation, Inc.

AAEI
American Association of Exporters & Importers. ``The national voice of the international trade community since 1921.''

AAEI
Australian Adult Entertainment Industry, Inc.

AAEM
American Academy of Emergency Medicine.

AAEM
American Academy of Environmental Medicine.

AAEM
American Association of Electrodiagnostic Medicine. Bzzzzzzzzzd-pop! Bzzzzzzzzzzd-pop! Used to be the ``American Association of Electromyography and Electrodiagnosis'' (AAEE). Here's a page served by an online exposition.

Whoops! AAEM namespace is gettin' ta be as crowdid as AAEE! In these hyar prairies, when you can see your neighbah's fahm, it's tahm to move on. Now they're AANEM.

AA/EOE
Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. This is probably equivalent to EO/AAE, but you better chant all the mantras, just to be sure no one sues the deep pockets off your sorry butt. (See the ADEA for a longer, safer, more ridiculous version.)

Couldn't they just say they obey the law? By pointing out that they obey these particular laws, aren't they implying that whether they obey other laws is a matter of discretion? Did you ever wonder what really would happen if the ob-AA/EOE or equivalent information were somehow omitted from an advertisement? The experiment has been performed! In the August 18, 1986, edition of C&EN (p. 63, center bottom), a help-wanted ad appeared that only described the qualifications sought and instructions for applying (by the following October 1). The vigilant AA apparatus of the employer (Arizona State University) sprang into action, managing to get the following emergency correction into the September 15 edition (p. 64, right bottom):

The advertisement for the position of MATERIALS TECHNICIAN in the ... which appeared in the Academic Positions Section of the August 18, 1986 issue of Chemical and Engineering News inadvertantly [sic] did not include the facts that Arizona State University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer and minorities are encouraged to apply. Application deadline extended to October 15, 1986 or until filled. Submit resume and 3 references to...

It is certainly true that the AA/EOE status of ASU is a ``fact'' distinct from the encouragement of minorities to apply. Still, the ability to deduce the latter fact from the former would not be surprising in someone with the required B.S. or M.S. degree in chemistry or a related field (let alone the ``highly desirable'' ``experience on the synthesis and characterization of solid state materials, including a working knowledge of crystal growth, vacuum system and inert atmosphere techniques'').

Okay, now for a pop quiz. Everyone loves a quiz! Here are two percentages: 3.0% and 4.4%. They represent the fraction of physicians who were black, based on the US censuses of 1960 and 1990. Here's the quiz question: which year had the lower percentage, 1960 or 1990? Think it over, take your time.

AAEP
American Association of Equine Practitioners. There's no longer a DNS listing for <aaep.org>. I'm worried. Have they gone the way of the AASP?

They're back! Yippee-aye-ayy!!! Cool horsehead-shaped yin-yang logo, too.

``The American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP) is the world's largest professional association of equine veterinarians. The AAEP's mission is to improve the health and welfare of the horse, to further the professional development of its members, and to provide resources and leadership for the benefit of the equine industry.''

There's also an international association (IAEP). Donkeys still don't get any respect.

[column]

AAES
[Publications of] American Archaeological Expedition to Syria.

AAES
American Association of Engineering Societies.

AAET
Astrological Association of East Tennessee. ``Welcome, Fellow Seekers!''

AAETS
American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress. Is that pronounced ``eats''? That's what I does when I is stressed. Or is it ``ates''? I wisheds they explaineds this -- it's beginning to freak me out!!!

``A multidisciplinary network of professionals who are committed to the advancement of intervention for survivors of trauma. The Academy aims to identify expertise among professionals, across disciplines, and to provide meaningful standards for those who regularly work with survivors. Today, the Academy's international membership includes individuals from over 200 professions in the health-related fields, emergency services, criminal justice, forensics, law, business and education. With members in every state of the United States and over 45 foreign countries, the Academy is now the largest organization of its kind in the world.''

(Is D.C. counted among states or foreign countries?)

AAETS defines traumatic stress as ``the emotional, cognitive and behavioral experience of individuals who are exposed to, or who witness, events that overwhelm their coping and problem-solving capabilities.''

Squaring the circle using only compass and straight-edge, finding the roots of a general quintic equation, expressing the indefinite integral of the Gaussian in closed form, finding a polynomial-time algorithm to solve a traveling-salesman problem, solving the quantum measurement problem, combining all four fundamental forces in a GUT. Oh yeah, I'm a survivor. (See Eric Zorn's report at the FLT entry.)

``Traumatic stress has many `faces.' In addition to the devastating effects of large-scale disasters and catastrophes, the Academy is committed to fostering a greater appreciation of the effects of day-to-day traumatic experiences (e.g., chronic illness, accidents, domestic violence and loss [and nonintegrability]). Our aim is to help all victims to become survivors and, ultimately, thrivers.''

AAF
Advanced Authoring Format. It's a ``multimedia file format that enables content creators to easily exchange digital media and metadata across platforms.'' So shouldn't that be the Advanced Co-authoring Format? It seems someone may have noticed the problem; during the first quarter or so of 2007, the AAF Association, Inc. (AAFA) became the AMWA (Advanced Media Workflow Association). Considering the groups involved, this seems to be of interest to television-related people and therefore almost inconceivably boring.

AAF
Affordable Art Fair. The idea is that no one should have to pay a lot of money to have a nice piece of abstract, pretentious crap to adorn the home. ``AF is the place for new and established collectors to discover and buy paintings, drawings, sculptures, video, photography and limited edition prints from distinguished galleries, all priced from $100 - $5000. This year [2007] the Fair will host more than 60 galleries with approximately a quarter of the exhibitors from Europe, Canada and South America.'' (Update 2010: ``priced from just $100 up to $10,000.'')

It is well known among artists that the way to get your work in the public eye and establish your name as you're starting out is to give your work away for free to established collectors. They then turn around and lend it for free to galleries. (Galleries would never display work that an artist tried to fob off on them directly. After all, curators have taste and perception, and one thing that just screams bad taste is giving it away for free.) That's one way the rich get richer and the poor poorer, but the real salt in the wound is that the poor have no place to display this ugly stuff except their own homes.

AAF
Alien Ant Farm. Their web pages advertise DVD's and talk about record labels and about being artists. I've never heard their stuff, but I'm sure it's music to some ears.

AAF
American Advertising Federation. They're trying to buy a good reputation. There ought to be money in flattering that vanity; check out their ``College Connection.''

Remember, the escape key turns off moving gifs (in Netscape, anyway).

They have

  1. ADDY awards,
  2. an Advertising Hall of Achievement, and
  3. an Advertising Hall of Shame, er, Fame.
If blots on the escutcheon are anything like those on ordinary cloth, these correspond to
  1. remove with water,
  2. remove with bleach,
  3. remove with scissors.

The Hall of Achievement is for those under forty, and the Hall of Shame is for those who are dead or soon will be (``[t]hose men and women who have completed their primary careers''). The Hall of Shame is unusually repulsive, as befits AAF.

``Upon induction into the Advertising Hall of Fame, each honoree receives a `Golden Ladder' trophy signifying membership in the Advertising Hall of Fame. This trophy, designed by the late Bill Bernbach, carries an inscription created by the late Tom Dillon, both of whom are members of the Hall of Fame.'' Both indeed.

The inscription: ``If we can see further, it is because we stand on the rungs of a ladder built by those who came before us.'' This inscription is a perfect epitome (epitomy) of advertising crassness. Firstly, because like typical advertising copy it is derivative. Specifically, it is derived from an expression that dates back at least to the twelfth century. The original form involves seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants (midgets seeing further in the standard versions). Secondly, because it is clumsy. (I'll come back later and express as elegantly as possible the inelegance of Dillon's locution. Now I have to move the computer.)

AAF
American Architectural Foundation. It ``educates individuals and communities about the power of architecture to transform lives and improve the places where we live, learn, work, and play.'' AAF has teamed with Target in ``Great Schools by Design,'' a ``national initiative to improve the quality of America's schools and communities.''

Target stores are right rectangular prisms with a minimum of windows or architectural interest. Bauhaus Kaufhaus, sorta. Your average 1940's brick schoolhouse seems an ornate cathedral by comparison. A common quick orientation to some engineering disciplines not unrelated to architecture: civil engineering makes targets, mechanical and aerospace engineering destroys them. The thought that this might not be a bad thing withal was expressed by John Betjeman in 1937, with Slough as the contemplated target. (This was not John Bunyan's parabolic Slough of Despond, but instead a hyperbolic Slough for desponding of in a real England.)

AAF
American Armoured Foundation, Inc. Why isn't that ``armored''? There's an AAF Tank Museum in Danville, Virginia; I'm not sure what the AAF comprises besides the museum.

AAFA
Advanced Authoring Format Association, Inc. Often partially abbreviated as ``AAF Association.'' During the first quarter of 2007, AAFA became the AMWA.

AAFA
Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

AAFC
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. AAC in French.

AAFC
All America Football Conference. A professional football league that operated for four seasons (1946-1949). Their teams included the Baltimore Colts (which only started up in 1947), (they replaced) the Miami Seahawks (which folded after one the first season), a Buffalo team that was known as the Bisons (1946) and (the first time the name was used by a pro football team) the Bills (1947-9), the Chicago Rockets (name changed to Hornets for 1949), Cleveland Browns, Los Angeles Dons, and the San Francisco Forty-Niners.

Two teams -- the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, took the names of existing local baseball teams (see Dodgers). What makes this unusually confusing is that there were just previously, or would soon be later, NFL teams with the same (or similar) baseball-team names. But first some general history...

With the end of the post-war boom in 1948, the AAFC could not sustain its battle with the NFL, and scrappy AAFC Commissioner Kessing -- I'm sorry, that was AAFC Commissioner Scrappy Kessing -- sought terms. At the end of the '49 season, the NFL merged-in three teams from the AAFC -- the Cleveland Browns, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Baltimore Colts -- and held a special draft for players from the four other surviving AAFC teams.

The Colts francise folded after one season (1950) in the NFL and the 49ers endured many lean years, but the Browns, which had dominated the AAFC and won all four AAFC titles, went on to win the 1950 NFL title against the LA Rams (formerly of Cleveland) in Cleveland. Cleveland continued to be dominant in the NFL, though less overwhelmingly than in the AAFC.

Now about those NYC-area teams... The NFL's Brooklyn Dodgers changed name to the Tigers for 1944 (please don't ask me about Detroit) and merged with the Boston Yanks for 1945. The owner of the defunct NFL Brooklyn Dodgers/Tigers became a founder of the AAFC and owner of the AAFC Brooklyn Dodgers in 1946.

For 1946-1948, there were two AAFC teams in the five boroughs: the New York Yankees and the sorry Brooklyn Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team was eventually offered a chance to buy their ailing namesake but passed. For 1949, AAFC Dodgers merged with the stronger local AAFC team to become the Brooklyn-New York Yankees, the same year that the NFL's Boston Yanks moved and became the New York Bulldogs. With the folding of the AAFC, the Bulldogs changed their name back in 1950, becoming the New York Yanks.

It happens that the first regular-season game ever played by the San Francisco Forty-Niners (and the first played by a California pro football team) was a 21-17 loss to the (AAFC) New York Yankees in September 8, 1946. In 1950, with the AAFC Yankees defunct and many of the players distributed by draft to other NFL teams, the San Francisco Forty-Niners played their first regular season game in the NFL on September 17 -- a 21-17 loss to the New York Yanks.

The NFL's Yanks did poorly and were sold to a group in Dallas, where they failed by midseason (1951, I think) as the NFL's Texans. They stayed on the road for the rest of the season and went to Baltimore for 1952 to become the new Baltimore Colts. Don't hold me to the precise years, or names or anything, 'cause I just blew a brain gasket.

Someday when you're older and have plenty of spare RAM, I'll tell you about the White Soxes.

AAFCO
Association of American Feed Control Officials. I imagine that AAFCO does good work, whut-everrr it is, but all I can think of is like, gag me with a spoon!

AAFHV
American Association of Food Hygiene Veterinarians. It's ``an organization of veterinarians whose professional activities and interests encompass the many contributions of veterinary medicine to a hygienic food supply.'' Kill them and eat them, but keep it clean?

AAFHV is also ``the United States constituent of the World Association of Veterinary Food Hygienists; the only professional food hygiene group represented in the AVMA House of Delegates.'' The AVMA ``House of Delegates''? It sounds so 1776.

AAFP
American Academy of Family Physicians. They also offer a site with ``health information for the whole family.''

AAFP
American Academy of Fixed Prosthodontics. ``The Academy consists of over 500 specialists around the world, dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, truth, and competency in research, in teaching, and in the clinical practice of crown and bridge prosthodontics.'' Dentures.

AAFP
American Academy of Forensic Psychology.

AAFP
American Association of Feline Practitioners. They're veterinarians, not cat burglars.

AAFPRS
American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. You know, with a little nip here and a tuck there, I could make a much more attractive and youthful-looking acronym for you. It's not about vanity, you know: it's simply good business sense. Your organization name is the face you present to the world; you'd be amazed how a pretty face draws customers. It makes you wonder what you're really selling.

AAFTE
Average Annual Full-Time Equivalent (students registered). A SUNY-specific acronym, apparently. More are explained at the end of this document.

A.A.G.
Afdeling Agrarische Geschiedenis. Dutch `Department of Agrarian History.' See A.A.G. Bijdragen.

AAG
Association of American Geographers. Everyone agrees that it was founded in 1904 in Philadelphia, but no one explains why. Did it have to do with the San Francisco earthquake (1906), the Russian-Japanese war, Einstein's special theory of relativity?

A constituent society of the ACLS since 1941. ACLS has an overview.

AAGBI
Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland.

A.A.G. Bijdragen
A.A.G. Bijdragen. `[Department of Agrarian History] Contributions,' a journal published approximately annually by the A.A.G. (the department whose name is abbreviated in the journal title) at Wageningen UR. It's a monograph series, usually one per year, in Dutch (usually with an English summary).

AAGL
American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists. Publishes a journal.

AAGPBL
All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. It iexisted from 1943 to 1954. It is now defunct. And if they were to bring it back now they wouldn't use the word girls.

AAGPBL PA
All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Players' Association. Not defunct.

AAGR
Average Annual Growth Rate.

AAGS
American Association of Geodetic Surveying. Member organization of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM).

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AAH
Association of Ancient Historians. With members like Herodotus and Thucydides? No... historians of antiquity, not from it. You know, like tuna that tastes good, not tuna with good taste. There's a directory of Ancient Historians in the USA in Canada.

AAH
Association of Art Historians.
We are the leading subject association for art history and visual culture in the UK. The AAH plays a key role in helping shape and secure the future of art history. We support those involved in teaching, learning and research.
You can inhale now.

They seem to work with rather a long timeline. I received a general announcement for the 2018 annual conference, to ``be co-hosted by the Courtauld Institute of Art and King's College London on 5th-7th April 2018,'' on April 2, 2017. Then again, the ``theme of the conference is `Look out!'.''. (Kind of them to single-quote that for me.) The expectation is that they'll attract ``around 1000 researchers, practitioners, museum curators and heritage partners'' whatever that last is. Isn't it amazing that huge events like this occur and don't make the news?

AAH
Australian Academy of Humanities.

AAHA
American Academy of Healthcare Attorneys. I'm hurt! Quick -- get me a personal injury lawyer! It's an emergency: call an ambulance chaser!

Phew! Okay, now that I'm convalescing I'll be needing a malpractice specialist.

AAHA
American Animal Hospital Association. (The link is to a website aimed mostly at veterinarians, with conference information and such. The AAHA also has a healthypet.com website with information for pet owners.)

AAHA
American Association of Homes for the Aging. Now AAHSA.

AAHABV, AAH-ABV
Association of Human-Animal Bond Veterinarians. It ``provides education, resources and support that enhance the ability of veterinarians to create a positive, and ethical relationship between people, animals, and their environment.'' When I visited in Jan. 2009, the homepage had a picture of someone in green scrubs and white lab jacket with one hand on the pet and one hand on the owner. ``Please add http://AAH-ABV.org to your list of favorite Web sites.''

AAHAM
American Association of Healthcare Administrative Management. Ah-- ahem, we'd like a word with you about your bill.

According to a partner organization, it ``is the premier professional organization in healthcare administrative management. AAHAM was founded in 1968 as the American Guild of Patient Account Management. Initially formed to serve the interests of hospital patient account managers, AAHAM has evolved into a national membership association that represents a broad-based constituency of healthcare professionals.''

AAHC
American Association for History and Computing.

AAHC
You say you wanted the Association of Academic Health Centers? That's the AHC.

AAHE
American Association for Health Education. One of six national associations within the AAHPERD.

AAHE
American Association for Higher Education. Take another drag if you're not high enough yet.

The AAHE has been described as ``kind of like the Association of American Colleges but with a higher pulse rate.'' Hmmm -- interesting metaphor. On March 24, 2005, AAHE Board of Directors announced that ``the Association will cease operations later this year.

In a statement to AAHE members, board chair Bernadine Chuck Fong, president of Foothill College, said, Despite vigorous efforts, president Clara M. Lovett and the board concluded that the organization no longer has the resources to continue its historic leadership role in higher education.

`The spirit of AAHE must and will continue,' said Dr. Lovett, adding that plans are under way to continue the Association's work in Assessment, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Electronic Portfolios, Campus Program, and other initiatives under the leadership of other associations and academic institutions. She said that discussions are already under way with the Lumina Foundation concerning relocation of the BEAMS (Building Engagement and Attainment of Minority Students) Project and with Heldref Publications, publisher of Change magazine. Since 1985, AAHE has provided editorial leadership for the magazine.''

AAHFRP
American Academy of Health, Fitness and Rehabilitation Professionals. Founded 1992 by Michael K. Jones, PhD, RPT, and Jeffrey Wright, RPT, gave a bunch of courses and granted a bunch of certifications up to at least 2004. However, sometime between then and April 2006, when I wrote this entry, it seems to have collapsed and died. Use it or lose it, I guess.

a.a.h.i.h.l.n.o.o.
As Always Hoping I Have Left No One Out. Traditional disclaimer following list of acknowledgments on David Meadows's sometimes-even-more-than-weekly Explorator. Meadows stopped using this abbreviation in Spring 2003, perhaps because of the angry controversy over whether it shouldn't be a.a.h.I.h.l.n.o.o. or a.a.h.i h.l.n.o.o. Cf. nitle.

AAHM
American Association for the History of Medicine. Founded in 1925, it is ``North America's oldest continuously functioning scholarly organization devoted to the study of all aspects of the history of the health professions, disease, public health, and related subjects. It ... comprise[s] ... professional historians, practicing health professionals, librarians and archivists in the history of the health sciences, graduate students and students actively seeking professional degrees.''

James Simon Kunen's The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (Random House, 1968) is about the author's experiences at Columbia University, which in those days was also known as Guerrilla U. It includes the author's parody of a literary analysis of a very short poem, reproduced in its entirety here: ``Them? / Ahem!''

AAHPERD
American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, Dance, Dance!

(Okay, just kidding.)

AAHPM
American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. The former AHP.

AAHPSSS
Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science. Also A2HPS3. The website looks authentically historical -- it was last modified in 1997 and has links to the 1994 and 1995 newsletters. I guess it's a shoestring organization like ours. Here's a little comradely advice: lose some unproductive letters. We started out with grandiose plans, as the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve. People would stop us at Burger King to ask us how to pronounce the name (``an gimme fries wit dat, too''). We weren't turning a profit, so we had to let a lot of characters go; we kept only the most initial ones, the ones up front, the profit-centers. Now we're SBF -- efficient. We still can't seem to turn a profit, though. I think the flaw in our business plan may be that we don't charge anybody for anything, but we can't afford an accountant to tell us for sure.

AAHS
American Association for Hand Surgery.

AAHSA
American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging. Previously known as AAHA.

AAHSL
Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries.

AAHSLD
Association of Academic Health Sciences Library Directors.

AAI
Alfred Adler Institut Düsseldorf.

AAI
American Association of Immunologists.

AAI
Arab American Institute. No hyphen. ``[A] non-profit, nonpartisan national leadership organization for Americans of Arab descent who are interested in the democratic process.''

AAIA
Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association.

AAICU
Alabama Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. (I hope that's pronounced ``Aye, aye! Coup. But I'm not going to make any effort to find out if it is, because it probably isn't.) A/k/a Alabama Independent Colleges. AAICU is an affiliate of NAICU. Surprised? You shouldn't be. AAICU seems to be growing briskly. When I read the homepage they had six members, and by the time the ``Member Institutions'' link had loaded, they had 14. (It wasn't a long wait, okay? I've got DSL.)

One of their members is the United States Sports Academy (USSA).

AAID
American Academy of Implant Dentistry. ``Dental implants are substitutes for the roots of missing teeth. They act as an anchor for a replacement tooth or crown or a set of replacement teeth.''

AAII
American Association of Individual Investors.

AAIM
Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine. It ``consists of the Association of Professors of Medicine (APM), the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine (APDIM), the Association of Subspecialty Professors (ASP), the Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine (CDIM), and the Administrators of Internal Medicine (AIM).''

AAIM
American Academy of Insurance Medicine.

AAIM
Asociación Argentina de Informática Médica.

AAIM
Association for Applied Interactive Multimedia.

AAIT
Atlanta Association of Interpreters and Translators. The Georgia chapter of the American Translators Association.

AAJ
American Association for Justice. Not to be confused with the Justice League of America. The JLA defends the innocent while wearing colorful tights; the AAJ defends anyone while wearing Brooks Brothers suits or similarly uncolorful attire. The AAJ is a rebranding of the American Trial Lawyers Association.

AAL
AfroAsiatic { Languages | Linguistics }.

AAL
Aid Association for Lutherans.

AAL
ATM Adaptation Layer. The layer of electronics closest to the sender or receiver. It chops up voice, data, image, video, whatnot data into 48-byte packets of information and passes them to the ATM layer, which slaps on a 5-byte header to produce 53-byte cells. AAL also performs the reverse procedure (generating audio, video, etc. from packetized data).

The AAL is divided into an upper sublayer called a convergence sublayer (CS) and a lower sublayer called SAR for segmentation and reassembly.

AAL uses different protocols for different kinds of data. See AAL1 through AAL5.

aal
A shrub found in the East Indies (according to OSPD4) and in the Scrabble tablelands. The plural form is aals.

Aal
German word for `eel.' (Masculine by default; plural form `Aale.')

AALAS
American Association for Laboratory Animal Science. Organized as the Animal Care Panel (ACP) in 1950, took current name in 1967. A professional, nonprofit association of people and institutions ``concerned with the production [I like that word], care and study of laboratory animals [per se].''

AALC, AALCT
Amphibious Assault Landing Craft.

AALE
American Academy for Liberal Education. You can join for a mere US$3000, but you have to be an institution.

aalii
A tree found in the tropics and in the vowel-rich soils of the Scrabble forest, which is seeded with as many A's as I's (nine of each). The plural form is aaliis.

AALL
American Association of Law Libraries.

AALPDU
ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL) Protocol Data Unit.

AALR
American Association for Leisure and Recreation. One of six national associations within the AAHPERD.

AALS
Association of American Law Schools. Founded 1900. A constituent society of the ACLS since 1958. ACLS has an overview.

AALS
Association of American Library Schools. Read this in a 1976 item; it may not be current.

AALSA
Asian American Law Students Association at UB.

AAL1
ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL) type 1. Protocol standard for constant bit rate (CBR) traffic like audio and video, and for emulation of TDM-based circuits such as DS-1 and E-1.

AAL2
ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL) type 2. Protocol standard for supporting real-time VBR communications -- i.e., connection-oriented traffic, a/k/a streaming audio and video.

AAL3/4
ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL) type 3 and 4. Protocol standard that upports both real-time and non-real-time VBR, as well as SMDS.

AAL5
ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL) type 5.

AAM
Air-to-Air Missile.

A.A.M.
The initials of Alexei A. Maradudin, well-known researcher in the physics of solids, with a particular focus (sorry, I had to say that) on the use of light scattering to study their surfaces and excitation spectra. His first publication, in 1957, was his only one that year, and so far about half-way through 2010 he's apparently only published three papers, but in between he has been prolific enough; ISI credits him with 600 publications.

A.A.M. are also the initials of Albert Abraham Michelson, famous for measuring the speed of light very precisely.

For some mild coincidences involving two initials and three scholars, instead of vice versa, see this A. E. entry.

AAM
Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers. They go by ``Auto Alliance'' for short, but others use AAM for shorter. The AAM, founded in January 1999, is the successor of AAMA, which was disbanded at the end of 1999. The Washington office closed its doors for the last time on New Year's Eve. The AAMA had been a trade association of American car manufacturers for 98 years, and after Chrysler Corp. was acquired by Daimler-Benz AG in 1999, the two remaining members -- GM and Ford -- quickly decided to replace it with a new organization.

The trade group was initially being bankrolled largely by six members with full voting rights: General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen. (``Industry maverick'' Honda rejected overtures to join the new alliance.) BMW, Volvo, and Mazda would participate in meetings and discussions as associate members. Membership has varied a little bit. By January 2001, FIAT, Isuzu, Mitsubishi, and Porsche had joined.

Here's a nice correct use of the verb comprise, from the alliance's about page (browsed in July 2007; lower-cased for readability): ``The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is a trade association of 9 car and light truck manufacturers including BMW Group, DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mazda, Mitsubishi Motors, Porsche, Toyota and Volkswagen.'' Oh sorry, that was just an odd use of the verb include.

(As of July 2007, ``DaimlerChrysler'' was correct. The previous May, an affiliate of the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, L.P., New York, agreed to buy an 80.1% equity interest in a future new company, Chrysler Holding LLC, with DaimlerChrysler to hold a 19.9% equity interest in the new company. The closing of the transaction took place on August 3, 2007. It may have taken a couple of months for the various name changes to become official. DaimlerCrysler was renamed Daimler AG and its stock ticker symbol (it's listed on the Frankfurt and Stuttgart stock exchanges and the NYSE) changed to DAI.

AAM
American Association of Museums. Holds its annual meeting in May.

AAM
American Axle & Manufacturing Inc. GM manufacturing facilities in Saginaw, New York (in the Buffalo area), which were spun off as a separate entity in 1994.

In February 1997, negotiations between the new management and the UAW went to the eleventh hour, eventually settling on wage and bonus terms similar to the union's pact with GM, with wages to rise to $25/hr in the third year of the agreement. At the time, industry analysts said the agreement would put American Axle at a substantial cost disadvantage relative to other component makers.

Nevertheless, in September 1997, AAM announced a deal to sell a majority stake to the Blackstone Group, a New York-based investment group. American Axle concentrates on components for rear-drive vehicles and makes axles for nearly all GM trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUV) produced in North America, and that sector was booming even as car sales declined.

AAMA
American Automobile Manufacturers' Association. I visited their website some time after Chrysler was bought by Daimler-Benz and it looked pretty moribund. For details, see the entry for the AAM (the successor organization). The AAMA was itself the successor or renaming of the MVMA.

AAMA
Architectural Aluminum Manufacturers' Association.

AAMC
Association of American Medical Colleges.

AAMI
Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation.

AAMN
American Assembly for Men in Nursing. ``Assembly''? Sounds like high school. ``The purpose of AAMN is to provide a framework for nurses as a group to meet, discuss, and influence factors which affect men as nurses.
Membership is open to any nurse -- male or female -- to better facilitate discussion and to meet the most important objective of AAMN -- strengthening and humanizing health care.''

AAMOF, aamof
As A Matter Of Fact. (Treated as a word when written in lower case, so first letter is capitalized at beginning of a sentence.) Cf. more careful AFAIK.

AAMOI
As A Matter Of Interest. But is it a fact?

AAMRL
American Association of Medical Record Librarians. Once the name of an organization founded as the Association of Record Librarians of North America (ARLNA, q.v.).

AAMSI
American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics.

AAMU
Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University. The campus is in Normal.

AAN
Action for Animals Network.

AAN
American Academy of Neurology.

AAN
American Academy of Nursing.

AAN
Army After Next. Some speculative exercises conducted by the US Army in 1998, intended to explore possible future issues in a different sort of next war than we eventually got.

AAN
Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.

AAN
Atti della Accademia di Scienze morali e politiche della Società nazionale di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Napoli. In a fairly literal translation: `Acts of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the National Society of Sciences, Letters, and Arts at Naples.' The abbreviation AAN is used by APh.

The expansion of AAN is sometimes written with ``di'' (`of') in place of ``in'' (`at, in'). This sometimes reflects the influence of the APh abbreviation list (that was the case for this very entry, originally) or the history of the society, which was founded in 1808 and was known as the Società Reale di Napoli until the end of the last monarchy (except that it was Società Reale Borbonica di Napoli from 1817 to 1861). There is some apparent disagreement regarding whether the ``di'' was officially changed to ``in'' on February 19, 1948, when -- on instructions from the two-year-old republican government -- ``Reale'' was struck from the name. (See a detailed history in English here.) In any case, the journal is not just for the arts of, at, or in Naples; it just happens that Naples is the location of Italy's national academy of sciences. I'm not absolutely sure this is Italy's only national academy of sciences, and I don't know if this journal is still published. I have begun research into these questions, however, and I am already able to inform you that my library doesn't and never has received the journal.

Also, one sometimes sees the name ending in ``Arti di Napoli, Napoli,'' but that's just a bit of informational sugar, as the computer scientists would say. It's like the ``London'' in ``London Times'' or in ``Nature (London).'' Or it would be if, say, the London Times were called the London Times, and somebody for some reason wrote the ``London London Times.'' Not to mention the London [Manchester] Guardian.

AANA
American Association of Nurse Anesthetists.

AANA
Arthroscopy Association of North America.

AANEM
American Association of Neuromuscular and Electrodiagnostic Medicine. Used to be the ``American Association of Electrodiagnostic Medicine'' (AAEM).

[column]

AANLS
American Association for Neo-Latin Studies. ``The purpose of the AANLS is to promote the study and teaching of Latin and Latin-language literature in their Neo-Latin manifestations, from the beginning of Italian humanism until the present day. Despite [the SBF glossarist would write ``because of'' here] the sheer size, [but despite the] importance, and longevity of this body of texts, much Neo-Latin literature remains overlooked and in acute need of every kind of scholarly attention, including basic inventorying and editing of texts; application of critical methods old and new; up-to-date translations for a wide audience; and cross-disciplinary linkage of these texts to the variety of fields for which they constitute valuable evidence, including the physical and social sciences as well as the humanities.''

I am reminded of ``Neo-Spanish,'' which is discussed at the 40 entry.

AANP
American Association of Naturopathic Physicians. (``Naturopathic physicians'' are ``N.D.'s.'')

AANP
American Association of Nurse Practitioners.

AANR
American Association for Nude Recreation. Based in Kissimmee(!), Florida. (Website design by Captain Jack Communications.) Founded in 1931. The AANR affiliate near my new home describes itself as a ``family naturist resort.'' It was founded in 1947. At the time that it was founded, the area was mostly farms. ``Sunny Haven'' is behind some high walls in the woods.

AAO
Alberta Association of Optometrists.

a. a. O.
German, am angegebenen Ort or am angeführten Ort, `at the place given' or `at the place indicated': loc. cit. This glossary has an entry for this Ort.

AAO
American Academy of Ophthalmology. ``The Eye M.D. Association.''

AAO
American Academy of Optometry.

AAO
American Academy of Osteopathy. Promotes or promoted the concept of cranial therapy. Listed on Quackwatch's page of ``Questionable Organizations.''

AAO
American Association of Orthodontists. Oh, man! It's a traffic jam of medical specialties with AAO abbreviations!

AAO
Anglo-Australian Observatory. Consists of the 3.9 meter Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) and the 1.2 meter UK Schmidt Telescope (UKST) on Siding Spring Mountain, outside Coonabarabran, NSW; and a laboratory in the Sydney, Australia, suburb of Epping. Funding by Australian and British governments.

AAO
Anodic Aluminum Oxide. Aluminum oxide (Al2O3) is one of those Cinderella materials, like graphite and soot, that was known but underappreciated before the nanoeverything craze. AAO is a mostly amorphous form of the material, grown electrolytically, as the name implies. AAO has a self-ordered pattern of pores that has been found very useful as a substrate for all manner of nanodevices.

AAOA
American Academy of Otolaryngic Allergy. Promotes or promoted the concept of clinical ecology. Listed on Quackwatch's page of ``Questionable Organizations.''

AAODC
American Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors. Also went by the initialism ODC; changed its name in 1972 to become the IADC, q.v.

AAOFAS
American Association of Orthopaedic [sic] Foot & Ankle Surgeons.

AAO-HNS
American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. Ah--Oww! You know, I don't like the way that initialism looks. It's strangely articulated. No, no -- don't move it! Lie perfectly still! We'll get a spinal professional to look at it very soon.

AAOS
American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Founded in 1933. ``[T]he preeminent provider of musculoskeletal education to orthopaedic surgeons and others in the world.''

AAOS
American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Founded in 1997 by the board of directors of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. A Washington, D.C., lobby for that other AAOS. There's also a PAC, founded in 1999.

AAP
Academy of American Poets. (No, no, not the ``American Academy of Poets'' -- there is no such organization.) They don't call themselves the ``AAP'' -- it's not poetical; they call themselves ``the Academy.'' I've just placed the entry here for sensible people. Sensible people probably also want to know what the AAP does. The AAP promotes public appreciation of poetry. They do this by paying audiences so that poets don't have to read to empty rooms. (I guess I better admit right away that the previous sentence is a joke; it's pretty believable, and loosely speaking it's probably true, so you shouldn't feel embarrassed or inadequate or downright imbecilic if you didn't see that it was an obvious joke. There, there, now -- it's alright, gimme a big smile!)

The AAP sponsors NPM.

AAP
American Academy of Pediatrics.

AAP
American Academy of Periodontology. We actually have a tiny bit of additional information about the AAP at this PI entry.

AAP
Applications Access Point.

AAP
Asian Academy of Prosthodontics. The organization name is prominently (i.e., in the window title of all its pages) misspelled (``Prosthtodoctic'') at its website as of November 24, 2008. Isn't prosthodontics all about looking good?

AAP
Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. See AJP.

AAP
Association of Academic Psychiatry.

AAP
Association of American Physicians.

AAP
Association of American Publishers, Inc. About three hundred member publishers, as of late 2002. Pat Schroeder represented Colorado in the US House of Representatives (D-CO1: Denver) from 1973 to 1996. After a brief stint at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, she became president of the AAP in June 1997. She still holds that position in 2007.

AAP
Atti dell'Accademia Pontiana, Napoli.

AAP
Australasian Association for Philosophy. AAP(NZ) is its New Zealand Division.

AAP
Australian Associated Press. Australia's national news agency, founded um, in 1940 or a bit before. Most Australian news is sourced from AAP. In addition to national, regional, and local general news from Australia, there's significant coverage of company developments through its press release service.

AAPA
American Academy of Physician Assistants.

AAPA
American Association of Port Authorities. An ``alliance of leading ports in the Western Hemisphere [that] protects and advances the common interests of its diverse members as they connect their communities with the global transportation system.''

``Diverse'' is a general-purpose word meaning ``it's all good.''

AAPA
American Association of Psychiatric Administrators.

AAPA
Asian American Psychological Association. ``The AAPA was formed to advance the welfare of Asian Americans through the development of Asian American psychology.''

AAPC
American Academy of Professional Coders. The Academy ``was founded in an effort to elevate the standards of medical coding by providing ongoing education, certification, networking and recognition.''

AAPC
American Association of Political Consultants. They have a Code of Professional Ethics! And a Hall of Fame! In 2013, Lee Atwater was posthumously inducted into the latter!

AAPCC
American Association of Poison Control Centers. Visit now and learn the number of a poison control center near (or maybe not so near) you.

AAPD
American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry.

AAPD
American Association of People with Disabilities. According to JFA, the AAPD is ``the largest national nonprofit cross-disability member organization in the United States [you wonder how far you can loosen the multiple qualifications and preserve the truth value of this statement; AAPD's self-description scratches the national but adds nonpartisan], dedicated to ensuring economic self-sufficiency and political empowerment for the more than 56 million Americans with disabilities. [Almost one in five? Is this mostly the elderly popsulation, or are they just counting extreme stupidity as a disability?] AAPD works in coalition with other disability organizations for the full implementation and enforcement of disability nondiscrimination laws, particularly the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.''

I remember in Mr. Warnock's ninth-grade Geometry class, how often when I would make a clarifying observation, there would be a commotion and a feverish scrawling, and with some ceremony a condisciple would soon present me with an ``Al Kriman Award.'' Judy was one of the more frequent presenters. She went on to be a TV news producer. I believe the award was in recognition of my obscurity, but neither I nor anyone else can recall any of my award-winning words. Eventually, someone who was also taking Print Shop printed up a tear-off stack of Al Kriman Awards with blue sans-serif lettering. It was a somewhat unruly class. Mr. Warnock used to plead wearily (not to me in particular, I think) ``you don't have to listen, but PLEASE SHUT UP!'' I don't think I ever gave a very long acceptance speech. I always thought it was peculiar to receive an honor named after oneself, but according to the program for AAPD's 2004 Leadership Gala, ``AAPD will also present the first-ever Linda Chavez-Thompson Award to Linda Chavez-Thompson, in recognition of her longstanding leadership towards inclusion of people with disabilities and their families within the labor movement.''

AAPD
Asian Academy of Preventive Dentistry.

AAPG
American Association of Petroleum Geologists. See also the Society of Petroleum Engineers.

AAPhA
Abstracts (of papers delivered at the annual meeting of the) American PHilological Association. The APA photocopies and sells them at the meeting. Surprisingly, these informal publications are indexed by APh. Or maybe not so surprisingly, as the abstracts are refereed to select speakers.

AAPHV
American Association of Public Health Veterinarians. Some years ago, the AAPHV had a page hosted by the AVMA. Today (early 2009), its page is hosted by the ACVPM. It looks just a wee bit inactive, to judge from web presence.

AAPI
Association d'Aide aux Personnes Incontinentes. I don't think I'm going to translate this. I mean -- I could do, I want to, I'm aching to, but I can hold it in.

AAPI
Audio Applications Programming Interface.

AAPM
American Academy of Pain Management. I don't know what you do, but sometimes when I try to walk on a strained tendon, I like to chew on my shoulder.

AAPM
American Academy of Pain Medicine.

AAPM
American Association of Physicists in Medicine. ``Adheres'' to the IOMP. That sounds vaguely unsanitary; I guess a word was wanted that wouldn't imply that AAPM was somehow subordinate to, subsumed under, or in any other way sub to the IOMP. I guess ``affiliated'' was tainted by its etymology (Latin filius, -i, masc., meaning `son'). Still, the IOMP doesn't claim to be an adhering organization of the AAPM. Would ``associated'' have implied too much independence?

In the context of associations, the word adhere is often used in the sense of conform to a rule or convention.

Cf. ACMP.

AAPOR
American Association for Public Opinion Research.

AAPP
AAP Pleonasm.

AAPP
Association for the Advancement of Philosophy & Psychiatry. It ``was established in 1989 to promote cross-disciplinary research in the philosophical aspects of psychiatry and to support educational initiatives and graduate training programs.'' (The URL looks impermanent. You may have to do a search.) ``Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology (PPP) is the official journal of the organization, published in conjunction with the Royal College of Psychiatrists Philosophy Group by The Johns Hopkins University Press.'' You know, stuttering is listed among p-p-p-psychological and behavioral disorders in ICD-10 (the code is F98.5). Let's think deeppp thoughts about this.

a.-a.p. pleonasm
Abbreviation-Assisted Pleonasm pleonasm. Plural form: a.-a.p.p. pleonasms. Implicitly refers to abbreviations that are not also acronyms or initialisms that have honorary acronym status. Pretty rare, compared to the AAP pleonasm, and even in absolute terms. So far, in fact, we've only noticed ``UK and Northern Ireland'' (``short'' for ``the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland''). If we notice another, we'll start introducing ugly and stupid variant plural forms like ``a.a.-a.a.p.p. pleonasmses.'' Don't tell me that would be ugly, stupid, or redundant, redundantly so or not.

AAP pleonasm
Acronym-Assisted Pleonasm PLEONASM.
    Here are some of the most popular, according to the latest updated rankings of an authoritative local study group:
  1. PIN number.
  2. VIN number.
  3. UPC code.
  4. HIV virus.
  5. ATM machine.
  6. MIDI interface.
  7. GUI Interface.
  8. Cisco Ccie.
  9. ABS System.
  10. or OBO.
  11. ABS Braking System. (What is it? A sense of déjà vu? You think this entry is...redundant?)
  12. CableACE Awards.
  13. PILOT payment.
  14. Saab AB.
  15. VCH Verlag; Wiley-VCH Verlag.
  16. MOSFET transistor.
  17. HRL Laboratories (or Labs).
  18. ECL logic.
  19. FET transistor.
  20. HARM missile.
  21. BTU unit[s]
  22. IUPUI (strictly speaking, this is an acronym with built-in pleonasm).
  23. BJT transistor. Has lost a lot of ground to MOSFET's, even to JFET's.
  24. For FPO.
  25. RTL level.
  26. FRED diode.
  27. TTP program.
  28. Software ISV.
  29. OT Topic.
  30. YELT Test.
  31. MECL logic. Very obsolete technology.

Deserving of special recogition is the extravagantly redundant BUILT Informationstechnologie AG.

First-runner-up: LIRA-Lab, apparently also an official pleonasm.

Honorable Mention: ``The NAVE Virtual Environment'' An AAP pleonasm constructed from a XARA.

Repeated, reckless use of AAP pleonasms is PNS Syndrome. If acronym AAP pleonasm is a problem, then perhaps sometimes XARA's are the solution. Indeed, if ``Acronym-assisted AAP Pleonasm'' were the expansion of AAP (it isn't, I think), then AAP itself would be a XARA. Look, just follow the link, already!

What, still here? Feeling sympathetically contrarian? See the false pleonasm entry.

AAPPSPA
American Academy of Private Practice in Speech Pathology and Audiology. I'd like to say something about the name of this organization, but I just can't seem to get the words out of my mouth.

AAPS
American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. Looks like a third declension. I guess aapem would be the accusative singular form. Sounds pretty aggressive, too.

AAPS
American Association of Physician Specialists.

AAPS
Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. ``A Voice for Private Physicians Since 1943.'' Oh cool -- they have a motto in, uh, looks like Greek to me: ``Omnia pro aegroto.''

AAPT
American Association of Philosophy Teachers. Hmmm. Let's think about that.

AAPT
American Association of Physics Teachers. Based in College Park, Maryland, at the famous address One Physics Ellipse.

AAR
Airport { Acceptance | Arrival } Rate. The amount of incoming traffic an airport is deemed capable of accepting. Normally stated as number of arrivals per hour.

[column]

AAR
American Academy in Rome.

AAR
American Academy of Religion, founded 1957. A constituent society of the ACLS since 1979. ACLS has an overview.

Begun as the Association of Biblical Instructors in American Colleges and Secondary Schools, it changed name in December 1922 to National Association of Biblical Instructors (NABI). The name was favored in part because nabi is Hebrew for `prophet.' Personally, I would distinguish between a biblical instructor like Samuel or Isaiah, say, and a Bible instructor like Ismar J. Peritz of Syracuse University, who conceived the idea of the modern organization in 1909. The current name was adopted in 1964.

AAR is closely associated with the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).

AAR
Association of (North) American Railroads.

AAR
Association of Authors' Representatives. A nonprofit ``organization of independent literary and dramatic agents.'' Among the requirements to join is two years in the business of being an agent.

The central reality to be understood here is that there is a large pool of frustrated wannabe-published hacks. Note the hyphen: they are hacks, what they want to be is published. Perhaps they've already had their manuscripts rejected by a few or a few dozen publishers. The cream of the crud may have had a few helpful criticisms in reply, but usually the assistant editor charged with processing the slush pile has read and discarded it on the basis of one or two paragraphs, and isn't going to bother attempting to educate the hopelessly ineducable. Many ``unpublished authors'' get the idea, or are mischievously given it, that their problem started at the transom, whereas really it started at the keyboard. Specifically, PEBCAK.

The comforting idea is that you need an ``in'' with the publishers -- a clubby, exclusive bunch consistent with your fantasies of the glamour of the publishing universe. The agent is your ``in.'' This delusion creates an opportunity for scam artists, who promise eventual publication and charge fees that are ultimately their main source of income. Reading fees, evaluation fees, marketing fees, office expenses, travel expenses, submission fees, shmooze-with-editors-at-expensive-French-restaurant expenses, etc. The SFWA has a nice long informative page on not getting stiffed. Damn! I wish I'd read that first! The AAR and similar organizations play a useful self-policing role for the agenting industry, by establishing codes of conduct which assure that their members, at least, are dealing honestly.

The AAR's code of ethics is called ``the Canon of Ethics.'' Similar organizations are the AAA in the UK (with a ``Code of Practice''), NZALA in New Zealand (``Code of Behaviour''), and AALA in Australia (just starting up as of this writing: founded in 2002; ``Code of Practice'' still in draft form). Canadian literary agents listed (not necessarily recommended) by TWUC do not list any AAR- or AAA-like memberships, and I'm not aware that the relevant laws in Canada are considerably stronger than in other English-speaking countries.

I know one fellow who submitted his novel (directly -- without an agent) to only a dozen or a score of publishers and actually got a nibble. The house sent the novel to two, then two more, and finally another two outside readers for review. (Maybe it was just the first chapter; I forget.) The first four, and one of the last two, liked it. Once they got a don't-like-it from a reader, they rejected it. The author never received any specific comments on the work. This all doesn't strike me as the most efficient way to do business, but maybe they're just a front or something. I guess you need an agent. (For an alternative approach, read this AAF entry.)

AAR
Automatic Alternative (communication) Routing.

AARA
Air-Air Refueling Area.

AARC
Alcohol and Addictions Resource Center. From the name, you'd guess it was a city park. But I guess they don't mean that kind of resource. AARC is based in South Bend and, um, serves Michiana.

AARHMS, aarhms
The American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spam. I didn't even know there was Spam in the middle ages. Oh wait -- that's the ``American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain.'' Sorry, my error.

Aarhms maintains a site called LIBRO.

AARN
Alberta Association of Registered Nurses.

AARN
Association for Australian Rural Nurses.

AARP
American Association of Retired Persons. You are welcome to join at age 50. Some pronounce AARP like Cockney `harp.'

In the movie Absolute Power (1997), Clint Eastwood, in the role of an aging thief (Luther Whitney), says

Go down a rope in the middle of the night? If I could do that, I'd be the star of my AARP meetings.

Generations hence, multimedia audiences will marvel at the many-layered subtlety of today's golden age of film dialogue. Cf. VCR entry.

It turns out that AARP no longer stands for ``American Association of Retired Persons.'' It's just a name now, it doesn't stand for anything, okay? It's what we call a sealed acronym.

In January 2005, accepting his New York Film Critics award for Best Director (for ``Million Dollar Baby'') Eastwood commented that ``Outside of the AARP sticker on my trailer, I'm no different than any other director.'' He needs to retire his gag writer.

AARP
Appletalk Address Resolution Protocol (ARP).

AAS
African Academy of Sciences.

AAS
American Antiquarian Society. More than a century passed between their foundation (1812) and their becoming a constituent society of the ACLS (1919). Impressive that they're always ``in character.'' (Similarly, their internet site was one of the last sites serving gopher protocol.)

ACLS has an overview, according to which their principal activity is ``[m]aintenance of a national research library [ (hours) (directions by horseless buggy) ] focusing on all aspects of American history and culture through 1876.''

AAS says it ``specializes in the American period to 1877, and holds two-thirds of the total pieces known to have been printed in this country between 1640 and 1821, as well as the most useful source materials and reference works printed since that period. Its files of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American newspapers, numbering two million issues, are the finest anywhere.''

Also: ``AAS is the third oldest historical society in this country and the first to be national rather than regional in its purpose and in the scope of its collections.''

AAS
American Association of Suicidology. At least when they bury this tragic neologism, it won't be in the churchyard.

AAS
American Astronomical Society.

AAS
American Astronautical Society. Something else again. They're concerned with putting intelligent life in nearby outer space, whether or not there's any out there already.

AAS
American Auditory Society. ``The American Audiology Society was formed in October, 1974. In June, 1978, after a vote by the members of the Society, the name was changed to the American Auditory Society.'' (Did they vote in favor of it?)

AAS
Angle-Angle-Side. (If triangles have two corresponding angles and one corresponding side equal in measure, then the two triangles are congruent.) Also ASA, and given the number of geometry books that have been written, probably SAA as well. Cf. SAS and SSS.

AAS
Association for Asian Studies, founded 1941, as publisher of the Far Eastern Quarterly (now the Journal of Asian Studies). Talk about getting in on the ground floor -- 1941 was the year that the Japanese Empire went to war against the United States. A constituent society of the ACLS since 1954. ACLS has an overview.

AAS
Atomic Absorption Spectro{ scopy | photomet{er|try} }. Often just `AA.'

Here's some instructional material from Virginia Tech (VT).

AAS
Australian Academy of Science.

AAs, AA's
Author's AlterationS. In principle, and even occasionally in practice, there may be just a singular alteration, but the difference between AAs and AA is one of grammatical number: AA tends to be construed singular.

AAS
Acrylonitrile/Acrylic elastomer/Styrene terpolymer. (Read ``acrylic elastomer'' as a single term, or just ignore ``elastomer.'') AAS resin was developed to improve the weatherability of ABS resin (butadiene elastomer).
AASA
American Association of School Administrators. Meets annually at the National Conference on Education held each February.

AASCU
American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

AASH
American Association for the Study of Headache. But not tonight. Or ever again -- they changed the name to American Headache Society (AHS).

AASHO
American Association of State Highway Officials. Founded on December 12, 1914, it inserted ``and Transportation'' (to become AASHTO) in November 13, 1973.

AASHTO
American Association of State Highway & Transportation Officials. See also AASHO.

AASL
American Association of School Librarians. A division of the ALA.

AASLD
American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases.

Related entries: ADHF, ALF.

AASLH
American Association for State and Local History. Boy, did I ever have this entry garbled. Among the organization's publications is a quarterly magazine called History News and a monthly newsletter with job listings, called Dispatch. It's an affiliated society of the AHA.

AASM
American Academy of Sleep Medicine. I think this must have had a name like ``American Sleep Disorders Association''; its domain is <asda.org>.

[column]

AASOR
Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research. This is the signature series of ASOR, a book series that began in 1919 (first volume appear 1920). Despite the name, publication has not always been very precisely periodical, although volumes did come out annually from 1992 to 2000 (AASOR 50-57); AASOR 60 has copyright year 2005.

ASOR has two other book series as well as various periodicals: a bulletin (BASOR), Near Eastern Archaeology (NEA), and the ASOR Newsletter (all quarterlies) as well as an annual Journal of Cuneiform Studies (JCS).

AASOR's editorial offices were originally (I believe) in New Haven, Conn., and later (through the 1970's) in Cambridge, Mass. From the 1980's through 1992, the series was published by Eisenbrauns. (This is a small academic press based in Winona Lake, Indiana. Founded by Jim Eisenbraun in 1975, it specializes in ancient Near Eastern studies, archaeology, Assyriology, and biblical studies.) From 1993 the series was with Scholars Press in Atlanta, Georgia (i.e., at Emory University, mentioned at this S.P.D. entry). We all know what happened to Scholars Press at the end of 1999, but since 1998 AASOR has been based at Boston University and published by David Brown Book Co.

AAS oscillations
Al'tshuler, Aronov, Spivak OSCILLATIONS. Oscillations in transport properties that are periodic in one-half of a flux quantum: Øo/2 = h/2e , observed in low-temperature transport in both metals and semiconductors, where conduction can take alternative paths that enclose magnetic flux.

Theoretical explanation in terms of weak localization is associated with alternating destructive and constructive interference of time-reversed scattering paths of individual diffusing electrons. (The paths are only approximately time-reversed, because magnetic field breaks the invariance. This becomes an issue at larger fields.)

Theoretical paper: B. L. Al'tshuler, A. G. Aronov, and B. Z. Spivak, Pis'ma Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 33, 101 (1981) [JETP Lett. 33, 94 (1981)].

Experimental paper: D. Yu. Sharvin and Yu. V. Sharvin, Pis'ma Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 34, 285 (1981) [JETP Lett. 34, 272 (1981)].

AASP
American Association for Single People. Also called ``Unmarried America.'' Or possibly not: ``Unmarried America is the membership division of Spectrum Institute (also known as the American Association for Single People).''

``Unmarried America engages in education and advocacy for America's 86 million unmarried adults. Our group includes people who are ever-single, divorced, or widowed, and who have a variety of living arrangements (solo singles, single parents, domestic partners, roommates, and unmarried families). We are seeking fairness for unmarried employees, consumers, and taxpayers as well as more recognition of unmarried voters.''

I guess ``ever-single'' is a euphemism to protect the feelings of people who have never ever been married. This is so silly it defeats any effort at parody.

A June 2004 Wall Street Journal article by Jeffrey Zaslow (no, I don't know if he's available) began thus:

When Thomas Coleman visits legislators in Washington, D.C., to lobby for the rights of unmarried Americans, he isn't always taken seriously. People learn the name of his organization -- the American Association for Single People - ``and they immediately snicker,'' he says. ``They'll ask, `What's a dating service doing here in the Capitol?' ''

The article explains that the ``association ... also goes by Unmarried America to avoid the singles-club stigma....'' Everybody's a linguist these days.

AASP
American Association of Swine Practitioners. What a concept in emotional counseling!

Oh -- a veterinarians' group. And they gave up this cool name to become the AASV? Keep the faith, AABP!

AASP
ASCII Asynchronous Support Package.

AASROC
Asia-Africa Sub-Regional Organization Conference. A meeting of a couple of dozen states in July 2003. The meeting was opened by Indonesian president Megawati Soekarnoputri (see see this MW entry), who had proposed the meeting in 2002. The meeting generated a number of documents about intercontinental cooperation in a spirit of mutual respect and blah blah, but an even more substantive achievement was preparation for a meeting in 2005, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference (AAC). The earlier conference was presided over by President Sukarno, Megawati's father. The 1955 meeting, like the 2003 meeting, was held in the West Java capital of Bandung, but many things have changed in the intervening 48 years. For starters, the conference name has doubled in size. If it gets any longer it will be too unwieldy to be practical. They should consider splitting the conference into separate African and Asian meetings. (The national capital, Jakarta, is also in West Java, about 100 miles NW of Bandung.)

AASRP
American Association of Small Ruminant Practitioners. Could this mean... llamas!!?

Affiliated somehow with the AVMA.

What about sheep?

AASS
Asia Aero Supply Services.

AASSWB
American Association of State Social Work Boards. Now the ASWB.

AASV
American Association of Swine Veterinarians. Cf. AASP.

AAT
Acetic Acid Test. See VIA.

AAT
An American Translation, published in 1976. Why read a translation when you can read the original in Early Modern English?

AAT
Anglo-Australian Telescope. See AAO entry.

AAT
Animal-Assisted Therapy. The animal is not a leech. Cf. AAA.

AAT
Art and Architecture Thesaurus. An on-line service of the Getty Institute. A multi-level-hierarchical thesaurus with cross references and even a bit of useful information.

AAT
(UK) Association of Accounting Technicians.

AAT
Average Access Time.

AAT
Advanced (abbreviated A!) Authoring Tools.

AATA
The American Association of Teachers of Arabic. AATA ``aims to facilitate communication and cooperation [among] teachers of Arabic and to promote study, criticism, research and instruction in the field of Arabic language pedagogy, Arabic linguistics and Arabic literature.''

AATA
Ann Arbor (MI) Transit Agency. Buses.

AATA
Art & Archaeology Technical Abstracts. AATA, published on mutilated tree corpses from 1966 to 2000, is continued by AATA Online: Abstracts of International Conservation Literature.

AATC
Advanced Automatic Train Control.

AATCC
American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists.

AATF
American Association of Teachers of French. This glossary has occasionally useful entries for France and for the French langue.

AATG
American Association of Teachers of German. Serving teachers of German since 1926.

AATH
Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor. It used to be called the American Association for Therapeutic Humor. I salute them for modifying the name without using a different punch line, I mean acronym.

Of course, the old claim goes that it takes twenty-five more muscles to frown than to smile, or something like that. So if it's strong face muscles you want, a real facial work-out, ill-humor is the face-healthy way to go. Grimace and snarl your way to strong, sexy lips!

Snopes has a page for this proverb, and includes a compilation of the putative respective numbers of muscles. Here are just the numbers (update of 2004.04.08):

muscle cnt.:     ratio
smile  frown
                   ________________
  17     41      2.4117647058823529
		   ________________
  17     43      2.5294117647058823
		   ______
  13     33      2.538461
		   ______
  13     50      3.846153
                   _
  15     65      4.3

   4     35      8.75

  10    100     10

  20    317     15.85

   4     64     16

   1     37     37

What we can see from this is that when both muscle counts are composite numbers, they almost always have a common factor.

AATI
American Association of Teachers of Italian.

AATJ
Alliance of Association of Teachers of Japanese. ``The Alliance offers training and professional development to Japanese language teachers in a variety of forms: by sponsoring workshops and summer institutes, by awarding individual small grants, and by sponsoring publications and materials.'' Apparently the AATJ is part of the ATJ.

AATN
Asociación Argentina de Tecnología Nuclear.

I can't seem to find a homepage for the organization (contact information on this page served by the Asociación Física Argentina, for AFA's nuclear and other divisions). I hope I can make it up to you with all necessary information. I'll just touch on the highlights. As they seem to me. The initially popular nationalist dictator Juan Perón was a great one for colorfully exaggerated turns of phrase. He famously boasted that Argentina would develop nuclear power and would sell it in 1 and 1.5-liter bottles (``en botellas de litro y litro y medio''). Mark this well: specificity adds bite. For other examples, also in the fiction genre, read Dickens. During the dictatorship, my father (Ing. Oscar Kriman) gave a public lecture on peaceful use of nuclear energy, as they used to say, and a government agent attended the lecture to make sure he said nothing that put Perón in a poor light.

People who know nothing of Argentine politics besides the Evita soundtrack wonder how anyone could fail to be charmed by a whore-turned-philanthropic-shakedown-artist and her fascist husband. It is hard to understand if you insist on remaining utterly ignorant, I guess. Oh wait: the prostitution charges, as well as any sense of historical reality, are denied on this worshipful webpage at the Eva Perón Foundation.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, well, Gabriel (another physicist of Argentine origin, like me) told me in 1980 that before the dirty war, Argentina had had more physicists per capita than any other country on earth. I haven't had a chance in the last quarter century to check that, but it seems credible. The dirty war began as the government of Isabelita Perón (J.D. Perón's third wife and vice president, then widow and president) was coming apart in the mid-1970's. The homepage of the AFA has a link to a list of 24 disappeared physicists, but many more left before they could be disappeared.

AATSEEL
American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.

AATSP
American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.

AATT
Animal-Assisted-Therapy Team[s].

AAU
Amateur Athletic Union. You know, millions of unfortunate children across this great country are forced to focus on schoolwork during their school years -- educational stuff, books and pencils and all that. How is that ever going to improve their ability to flip a hamburger, eh? Each and every one of these children is missing the chance of a lifetime.

AAU
Association of African Universities. Association des Universités Africaines (l'AUA).

``The Association of African Universities is an international non-governmental organisation set up by the universities in Africa to promote cooperation among themselves and between them and the international Academic community. ...formed in November 1967 at a founding conference in Rabat, Morocco, attended by representatives of 34 universities who adopted the constitution of the Association. This followed earlier consultations among executive heads of African universities at a UNESCO conference on higher education in Africa in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in 1962 and at a conference of heads of African universities in 1963 in Khartoum, Sudan.''

Leave this site and read the Constitution and Bye Laws!

AAU
Association of American Universities. An association of sixty-one ``leading research universities'' in the US and Canada, as of April 2001.

``Founded in 1900 to advance the international standing of US universities... today focuses on issues that are important to research-intensive universities, such as funding for research, research policy issues, and graduate and undergraduate education.''

AAUG
Association of Arab-American University Graduates.

AAUP
Association of American University Presses. You can visit their Combined Online Catalog/Bookstore.

AAUP
American Association of University Professors.

AAUSC
American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators.

AAUW
American Association of University Women. Founded in 1881 to protect and promote the opportunity for women to attend university. Has recently taken up more hip causes. Holds its biennial national convention in June of odd-numbered years.

See more at the YWLS.

AAV
AdenoAssociated Virus[es].

AAV
Alternate Access Vendors.

AAV
Association of Avian Veterinarians.

AAVA
The American Academy of Veterinary Acupuncture. The only way I could have made this up myself is by playing Mad Libs.

AAVA
American Association of Veterinary Anatomists.

AAVC
American Association of Veterinary Clinicians. ``The mission of the American Association of Veterinary Clinicians is to enhance the quality of and be an advocate for veterinary clinical teaching, service, and research.'' Personally, I'm just gratified at their proficient construction of a tandem parallel structure, complete with different prepositions with a common object. They can put down my dog any day.

AAVE
African American Vernacular English. What used to be called BEV.

AAVI
American Association of Veterinary Immunologists.

AAVLD
American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians.

AAVMC
Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges.

AAVPT
American Academy of Veterinary Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

AAVS
American Anti-Vivisection Society.

AAVSB
American Association of Veterinary State Boards.

AAVSO
American Association of Variable Star Observers. The stars are variable, not necessarily the observers.

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A.A.V.V.
Auctores Varii. Latin: `Various authors.' Not the sort of abbreviation you'd be likely to encounter the singular form (A.V.) of. VV.AA. in Spanish.

AAW
Advertising Association of Winnipeg, Inc. Huh! And here I was thinking it was Winnipeg, Ont.

Hmmm. I seem to remember Winnipeg is a pretty big city. Why can't I find it on the map? There it is! What's it doing as the capital of Manitoba? This has been a very confusing day.

AAWR
American Association for Women Radiologists. Founded in 1981 ``to provide a forum for issues unique to women in radiology, radiation oncology and related professions; sponsor programs that promote opportunities for women; and facilitate networking among members and other professionals.'' Strangely, its official journal is the JWI, which has little to do with the stated purposes of the AAWR. I guess it's a marriage of convenience (this sort of thing is allowed in Massachusetts). The journal started publication in 1999, and the association between AAWR and JWI only dates back to 2003.

AAWV
American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians.

AAWW
The Asian American Writers' Workshop.

Until I hear different, I'm going to assume this is an Asian Workshop for people who write in the or an (which one isn't clear) American language.

AAZA
American Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Apparently never precisely the official name of the organization now known as the AZA. (Then again, perhaps AAZA was someone's abbreviation of American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums; that was the AZA's original name, but AAZPA was the preferred acronym.)

AAZN
American Association for Zoological Nomenclature.

AAZPA
American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums. Original name of organization now known as the AZA.

AAZPAa
American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquaria. See AZA.

AAZV
American Association of Zoo Veterinarians.

AB
Just AB. Not an abbreviation or acronym or anything -- just A ... B. Pronounced ``Ay-Bee,'' but spelled more efficiently with only two letters. This is a personal name, distinct from, having no etymological relation to, and pronounced differently than, Ab.

The given name, or perhaps rather the taken name, of a buddy of mine in college. At birth he was given a couple of more conventional names, but he came to be called `AB,' much as John Robert's come to be called `JR.' He had his name legally changed to `AB,' the beginning of no end of trouble. Every organization with its Procrustean form wanted to break his name apart and distribute the pieces to `First' and `M.I.' It was inevitable that he would become a philosopher.

His last name begins with C.

ab
ABdominal muscle. Usually plural -- abs. One of the first things you should do when you lose your mind and decide to become a black belt in Scrabble® is to memorize all the two-letter words. This one and its plural are in all three major Scrabble dictionaries.

AB
Able-Bodied (seaman).

ab-
ABsolute. An obsolete (absolete? obsolute?) prefix in old cgs unit systems. This goes back to a time when there were two kinds of standards that defined metric units -- ``absolute'' and ``international.'' Absolute units were defined according to a gold standard that was not very convenient (and which was kept in a single location -- Paris, I guess it must have been). The ``international'' value definitions corresponding to portable standards. In other words, absolute units were the fundamental definitions, or as fundamental as were in use at the time. International units were practical. The prefixes abs- and int- were applied to the unit names (as in ``abvolts'' and ``intvolts'') to indicate, if appropriate, which standards had been used.

Units in some cgs systems used another non-numerical prefix, stat-, contrastively with ab-. This had to do with two parallel systems of units for electromagnetism: the electrostatic cgs units and the electromagnetic cgs units. Interconversions among these systems are rather subtle, because they refer to units in systems with different underlying equations. (Distances, masses, and times are rather directly comparable, and their evaluation does not involve inference from an equation. Similarly acceleration, which has a natural definition not involving any proportionality constant. As soon as one gets into forces and charges, however, one has to use equations, and there are a number of different, equally ``natural'' ways to fit together the Maxwell's equations and the Lorentz force law.

The cgs system allowed two different sets of equations, one more convenient for electrostatics and one more so for electromagnetics. Parallel sets of units, esu and emu, respectively, were devised for the two parallel systems of equations. When a base term like volt or ampere was used in both systems, a prefix (stat- for esu, ab- for emu) was used to disambiguate.

Neither system defined a fundamental unit of charge. That is, the statcoulomb (also called the franklin) and the abcoulomb were expressible in (mostly half-integer) powers of centimeter, gram, and second. (A statcoulomb or abcoulomb was also called an esu or emu. Unfortunately, esu can also stand for statvolt, statampere, stattesla, etc. Likewise emu with abvolt, abampere, weber, etc.) The consequences persist to this day, as many of the cgs units, particularly the cgs emu ones (notice the hidden false pleonasm!), persist in use in various fields.

The MKSA system of units for electromagnetism, which extends the MKS system, is based on a single set of equations. Those equations are rationalized (i.e., they have a lot of explicit factors of 4π), which makes them rather clunky for theoretical work. If I'm not mistaken, the fellow who proposed the MKSA system beat out Enrico Fermi for a faculty position in one of those rather fixed competitions they regularly have in Italian academia. I'll try to look into it, but if you can't wait, you can probably find the guy's name and some other details in Laura Fermi's Atoms in the Family.

AB
Adreßbuch. A German word.

A/B
AirBorne. There are many instances where this expansion can be ruled out on heuristic grounds.

AB
Air Bridge. An electronic connection between devices on the same semiconductor chip, that is made by a connector that rises above the rest of the solid surface. Another way to put it is that the metal is a topological handle of the chip. The typical way it's made, however, is to deposit metal across a raised pattern of polymer material. That polymer is then etched away, leaving an air gap (or, in slightly exotic situations, a vacuum or gas gap) between part of the interconnect and the rest of the chip.

Here's a picture of one fabricated at Notre Dame's Microelectronics Lab.

Air bridges are usually not necessary and typically inconvenient. The reason is that integrated circuits are kind of like printed circuit boards with many interconnected layers of printed circuitry, so there are many ways to connect any pair of nodes. (In honest-to-god printed circuits with copper cladding patterned on only one side of a fiberglass board, the restriction of interconnects to a single plane complicates things. To complete the circuits one typically has to take advantage of the space underneath discrete components soldered on top of the board, and in extreme situations one has to create such discrete components in the form of zero-ohm resistors.)

Microelectronic circuits are created by processes of patterning and deposition that leave almost all elements of any circuit in physical contact with neighboring elements. This is true not only of active elements (mostly transistors) and passive elements (capacitors being the most common now that Si MOSFET's dominate, even if you count as resistors the transistors connected up to function as such), but also of interconnects between different components of the same chip.

AB, A.B.
Aktiebolag[et]. Swedish, `[the] stock company.' Cf. German equivalent AG.

Ab
AlBite. This is the name of a common chemical compound, (sodium aluminosilicate: NaAlSi3O8) and a range of minerals high in albite chemical composition. The minerals are a part of the feldspar family. Specifically, solid solutions of albite and anorthite (calcium aluminosilicate, abbreviated An) are called plagioclase feldspar. Mineralogists refer to the ``plagioclase feldspar series,'' but it is not a discrete series or sequence as the mathematical sense of ``series'' suggests; albite and anorthite are completely miscible, and ``plagioclase feldspar'' designates solutions of the two in any proportion. The mineral albite is plagioclase feldspar with no more than 10% anorthite.

AB
Postal abbreviation for the Canadian (.ca) province of Alberta. Capital: Edmonton.

AB
Amplified Bible. It's the good ol' Good Book, alright, but it's LOUDER.

Okay, here's another interpretation: it's a translation of the American Standard Version into English, with clarifying commentary. It contains so many hints that if you're not careful, you might be led into a tendentious reading. To avoid this danger, just look at the words without actually reading them. (That's what most people do.)

Actually, the AB turns out to be useful. I discovered this while skimming Where To Find It in the Bible, compiled by Ken Anderson and published in Nashville. The cover promises ``Hundreds of Contemporary Topics.'' Contemporaneity is achieved in part by sampling eleven different translations. Some of the contemporaneity turns out to shine out from only a few or even just one version. [I was talking with a French colleague once whose English was quite good, but who at that moment couldn't recall the English for savoir faire. After I told him, he made sure to say ``know-how'' about a dozen times in the next couple of minutes. I guess that's how you get to learn a foreign language well, or to spell contemporaneity.]

For example, guitars are only mentioned in AB (specifically heaven's guitars, mentioned in Revelations 5:8). This is one of the illustrated entries. (Yes -- it's amplified and illuminated. Thou wanteth not for any more contemporaneity than that.) Apparently heaven's guitars are electric bass guitars -- they're AMPLIFIED. Here's the AB text of chapter 5, verse 8:

And when He had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders [ftnt.: of the heavenly Sanhedrin] prostrated themselves before the Lamb. Each was holding a harp (lute or guitar), and they had golden bowls full of incense (fragrant spices and gums for burning), which are the prayers of God's people (the saints).
Eh.

AB, A.B.
Arts Baccalaureate. Or the original Latin Artium Baccalaureus. Alternate name for BA.

AB
At Bat[s]. Baseball term. Originally called a ``hand.'' (See the striKe entry for related information.)

The slugging percentage is the average number of bases reached from home per AB. Excluded in the count are walks (base-on-balls or hit-by-pitch), sacrifices, and interference.

ABA
Acrylonitrile Butadiene Acrylate.

ABA
American Bankers Association.

ABA
American Bar Association. The professional society for American lawyers. Remember, if you can't say anything nice -- then at least don't say anything litigable.

ABA
American Basketball Association. Did a fast break. A challenge, from 1967 to 1976, to the NBA's near-monopoly on professional basketball entertainment in the US. In the end, the four strongest teams joined the NBA, the better players were hired into the NBA, and the rest of the ABA folded.

ABA
American Basketball Association. It's another challenge to the NBA, this one founded in 1999. It also uses a red, white, and blue ball, and it also has miserable ratings, if it has ratings at all. I suppose it might be a handy way to make a tax loss, so the one thing that might make the ABA a going proposition would be higher and more progressive marginal tax rates. One novelty I am aware of is that the new ABA has teams outside of English-speaking North America: Beijing, Tijuana, and Montreal. Okay, I've been in Montreal, and they speak English there too, but you have to say hello in French first or you'll be arrested.

ABA
American Booksellers Association. Excellent, informative site. Another good place to look for related information is Bookwire (TM), from Bowker Book Information Co.

Isaac Asimov wrote a mystery called Murder at the ABA. This ABA.

The ABA and AAP sponsor BookExpo America (BEA) in Chicago, Wednesday through Sunday following Memorial Day. It used to be called the American Booksellers Association Convention & Trade Exhibit.

ABA
American Bridge Association. Contract Bridge, you know? The card game, not the civil engineering project.

There's a separate organization called the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL). In the bad old days, ABA was for blacks and ACBL was for whites. Both still exist as independent leagues.

ABA
Asociación de Bancos de Argentina. `Association of Banks of Argentina.' Since 1998; details at ADEBA. If this ABA and the preceding one got together, the next ABA might be the result.

ABA
Asociación del Bridge Argentino. `Association of Argentine Bridge.'

In case you're wondering -- and doubtless you are -- the standard noun-before-adjective order of Spanish would allow the name to be interpreted as `Argentine Association of Bridge.' However, gender agreement with asociación (feminine) would require the adjective to be argentina for this interpretation. So the name really implies that the bridge (card game) is Argentine rather than the association. It's a distinction without much difference, however. A construction like ``bridge argentino'' is understood as `bridge in Argentina' if there doesn't happen to be a particular Argentine game of bridge.

ABA
Association for Behavior Analysis.

ABAA
Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America. A national association within the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers / La Ligue Internationale de la Librairie Ancienne (LILA/ILAB).

ABAAS
Anglo-British Academy of Advance Studies. For a fraction of a moment, you might be willing to suppose they mean British in the ``Brythonic'' sense common before the union of England and Wales with Scotland. Then you notice that they're not actually concerned with the Study of Advance. ``ABBAS is aware of the need for development & knowledge, as knowledge is power, and power is wealth.'' I'd like to see them develop this idea further, with conversion factors.

abacost
A bas le costume. Lemme see -- I guess that means `underwear'! Ooh, close: it means `down with the suit.' I like my translation better. The contraction was used in Zaire as the name for a faux-traditional dress of tunic and pants whose design was credited to the dictator Mobutu, and which was loosely inspired by the ``Mao [Zedong] suit.'' The tunic was designed to be worn with a foulard at the neck. The abacost was required business wear in Zaire, part of Mobutu's campaign for African ``authenticity'' (later simply called Mobutuism). More on that in the material we have on Mobutu Sese Seko's name.

In Woody Allen's 1971 movie ``Bananas,'' the new dictator of the banana republic decrees, as power almost visibly goes to his head, that underwear shall be changed frequently, and that in order to facilitate enforcement of the decree, underwear shall be worn on the outside. Mobutu's authenticity campaign began in 1971. If I track down the details, I may be able to say whether life imitated art or vice versa in this case. More on ``Bananas'' at the Abe entry below.

I guess that, just as the abacost was meant to be accessorized by a foulard, the Mao suit or Mao jacket was meant to be accessorized by a Mao cap. In 1980, my friend Fu was going home to Shanghai for some weeks and asked if there was anything I'd like him to bring back, so I asked for a Mao cap. I was already too late. On return he reported that they were already impossible to find in the city, though he figured they might still be available in the countryside.

Well, here it is August 2005, even Sendero Luminoso seems to have gone dark, yet there's still a place that's safe for Maoists. That's right: California. See the MIM entry.

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abacus
This is a serious glossary! How could we have an entry for abacost and not for abacus?

The mental image that most people have of an abacus is of the East Asian abacus: a rectangular frame that can be stood vertically, supporting two parallel ladders of horizontal bars with beads. (In Japanese: soroban; from Mandarin: suàn pán, meaning roughly `calculation board.') The traditional Western (or at least the ancient Greek and Roman) abacus was simply a small sandbox with pebbles. In Latin, a pebble, or small stone, is a calculus. Over time, the word took the sense of `means [or system] of computation,' or just calculation in general. In some cases, the calculation might be somewhat metaphorical -- e.g. ``moral calculus'' referring to the set of competing considerations, and the reasoning about them, used to make an ethical decision.

In the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz first developed mathematical techniques based on infinitesimals. (They developed these independently and more or less simultaneously, and there was a bitter controversy over priority. As the contents of the Archimedes palimpsest originally discovered by Heiberg are teased out, we may see to what extent this contest is made moot.) Parts of the mathematical field that developed from that 17c. work came to be called the differential and the integral calculus. (Beyond the elementary calculations, it can become difficult to keep the two separate; e.g., integrating a nontrivial differential equation. Indeed, the fundamental theorem of calculus states essentially that the derivative of the indefinite integral of a function is the function itself, so the connection is quite fundamental.) Today the word calculus, not further modified, refers to elementary manipulations of differential and integral calculus. The word also continues to be used to help name some other mathematical subdisciplines, such as ``calculus of finite differences.''

On page 73 of the autobiography mentioned at the 86 entry, Stan Ulam relates a conversation he had with John von Neumann in 1936. Stan was disappointed with the isolationary specialization he found among mathematicians at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS).

Being a malicious young man, I told Johnny that this reminded me of the division of rackets among Chicago gangsters. The ``topology racket'' was probably worth five million dollars; the ``calculus of variations racket,'' another five. Johnny laughed and added, ``No! That is worth only one million.''

(BTW, that was a very sound correction, in relative terms, from a mathematician's perspective.)

In at least one case, the word calculus is used to give a name to a hodge-podge of tools and concepts: a fairly standard third-year college course for math majors is ``Advanced Calculus.'' This typically covers point-set topology on the real line, convergence of series, introduction to measure theory, etc. The graduate-level course that more or less covers a superset of this material is typically ``Analysis'' or ``Real Analysis'' (although the set of real numbers is really only one especially interesting special case). Analysis is another one of those words that could in principle mean so much that it might mean nothing at all if conventional usage were less parsimonious.

B. L. van der Waerden's obituary for Emmy Noether appeared in the German journal Mathematische Annalen [``Nachruf auf Emmy Noether,'' in vol. 111 (1935) pp. 469-476]. He mentions a number of awards that her work won, and a lot of them explicitly mentioned Arithmetik. In this context, of course, `arithmetic' referred to real-number (and general metric space) analysis.

Oh, bummer! I just realized that I have already written an entry for calculus! Well, follow the link -- there isn't too much overlap, and there's more on the abacus.

abandonware
Commercial software no longer sold, treated as free (but not freeware, q.v.). Term seems most prevalent in games programs.

ab asino lanam
Latin: `wool from an ass.' (That's a quadruped ass, not an arse.) Hen's teeth.

ABATE
American Bikers Aimed Towards Education. A safety, educational, charitable and advocacy organization for motorcyclists.

abatis
A barrier made of felled trees, according to the OSPD4. The sort of barrier common in the Scrabble forest. The plural form is formed with -es: abatises. The singular and plural are also spelled with double tee.

ABATS
Automated Bit Access Test System.

abattis
Abatis.

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ABAW
Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. German, `Transactions of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.' Continues the journal SBAW, q.v. The philological study of classical antiquity is within the bailiwick of this Bavarian academy. So, as discussed at the Geisteswissenschaften entry, Wissenschaften means something like the French word sciences.

ABB
ASEA Brown Boveri.

[group picture of ABBA]

ABBA
The name of the group is the first initials of the band members: Agnetha Fältskog, Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Anni-Frid (Frida) Lyngstad (listed here from oldest to youngest, FWIW; I think that's the order if there's an official one; there are, of course,
2 × 2 = 4
possible orders consistent with the group name; philologically speaking, I think it's suggestive that chronological ordering yields the name, which has an a priori probability of only 1/4 -- I mean, they might've been BABA). The first pair were married and the second pair had a relationship. Eventually, everyone split up reportedly amicably (in 1982) and continued solo or other-group careers. This unofficial page is as good a place to start as any. A French TV retrospective called ``Thank You ABBA'' led to a video, coreleased with CD box set.

In 1977, they released the album ``Knowing Me, Knowing You.'' The cover art featured the two couples in a somewhat symmetric order (B, A, A, B) and the group name written with an unprecedented degree of bilateral symmetry: the second letter B was printed backwards (i.e., facing left). ABBA was always very un-metallic and generally too sweet to be truly cool, so it's great to know that bands like NIN are derivative. Just call them ninnies.

ABBF
Asian BodyBuilding Federation.

ABBL
Association des Banques et Banquiers, Luxembourg. That might be its single official name, or its official name in French, or simply the name that appears first on its website. Alternate names given are ``The Luxembourg Bankers' Association'' and ``Luxemburger Bankenvereinigung.'' I've seen ABBL expanded in English-language reporting as the ``Association of Banks and Bankers of Luxembourg'' (almost the literal translation of the French name).

Like many Luxembourg websites, that of the ABBL is easiest to read if you are comfortable in at least a couple of languages. (English and French, in this case. To take another example, the Editpress Tageblatt Luxembourg, whose name is a slightly macaronic mix of at least English and German, has webpages in a mix of French and German. No translations are offered, of course. In a truly multilingual country, they're not needed.)

abbr., abbrev.
Abbreviations for abbreviation. Ooooh, spooky! Makes chills run up and down my spine, self-reference and all that.

abbreviated loans
We're not talking finance here. This is the entry for terms and words that undergo substantial abbreviation in the transition from one language (the ``source language'') to another language (the ``target language'' is the usual term, but I use ``destination language'' because it's obviously a superior term). In many cases, the abbreviation consists of dropping words from a compound noun or phrase in the original language. For now I'll just accumulate examples as I encounter or recall them. Maybe I'll draw some inferences later.

From English to various continental languages

parking lot > parking
smoking jacket > smoking

From English to Japanese

overhead projector > OP

ABC
ABaCavir. An NRTI used in the treatment of AIDS.

ABC
Absorbing Boundary Condition[s].

ABC
Academia Brasileira de Ciências. `Brazilian Academy of Sciences.' Founded May 3, 1916, in Rio de Janeiro, as Sociedade Brasileira de Sciencias. Name changed to current one in 1921. I guess they piggy-backed on the orthographic reform.

A-B-C
Accelerator, Brake, Clutch. The standard order of pedals, from right to left, in both LHD and RHD vehicles. If your motor vehicle doesn't have a clutch pedal, well whoop-dee-doo! Give your left-most foot a rest.

ABC
Activity-Based Costing. The evaluation of costs based on activities and procedures. Roll the dice.

In Portuguese, ABC is expanded `Custeio Baseado em Atividades.' Fascinating, isn't it? It's what makes the lives of glossarists the stuff of legend.

ABC
Always Buy Chesterfields. Apparently a once-persuasive and cogent advertising slogan for a brand of cigarettes with the longest name among popular brands.

Personally, I prefer Marlboros. Or is that Marlboroes? Marlboroughs? As it happens, I don't smoke, so this fact doesn't much affect any cigarette company's bottom line. You get a lot to like with a Marlboro. Like what?

You know, while we're on the subject: I feel that the cig companies are getting a bad rap on the ``societal costs of smoking'' thing. A bunch of state attorneys general have sued them to recover the state-funded portion of the greater medical expenses incurred by smokers, but this is only looking at one side of the ledger. Actuarial studies have repeatedly demonstrated that existing state cigarette taxes just about pay the total government costs caused by smoking. They don't cover the total increase in (government outlays for) medical treatment, but the difference is about made up by the decrease in social security benefits paid, since smokers don't live as long as nonsmokers. Obviously, the state attorneys general should be suing the federal government to adjust the funding formulas for social security.

I read that the cigarette companies introduced this argument once, but that it was rejected on some technicality. (You know, if you save someone's life it doesn't give you a right to kill them?) Still, why don't they publicize this totally exculpatory argument? It would improve their public image, sure. (I guess they settled the suit, but when the US Congress refused to sign off on their part of the bargain, it left a lot of things unresolved. As of July 2000, I don't know the status anymore.)

ABC
American Bird Conservancy. In 1997, ABC launched a propaganda campaign called ``Cat Indoors!'' As you can imagine, the goal of this campaign is to create an unnatural predator-free environment for birds, so that marginally viable birds compete with healthy ones for limited food supplies, and bird populations are kept in check only by the ravages of slow-acting starvation and disease. It is cruel not only to wild birds but to all the animals raised in confined and degrading conditions for eventual slaughter and milling into canned cat food.

Of course, the bird conservancy helpfully points out, ``Keeping Cats Indoors Isn't Just For The Birds'' (it's the title of a free brochure). They say that ``[s]cientists [scientists!] estimate that free-roaming cats kill hundreds of millions of birds, small mammals, reptiles and amphibians each year.'' To think of all those cute furry rats whose diseased, bird-egg-eating lives are brought to a premature end.

ABC
American-Born Chinese. Ethnic Chinese born in the US. Not exactly the complement of FOB. Cf. ABCD.

ABC
American Bowling Congress. The world's largest sports organization and the official rule-making body of tenpin bowling. Perhaps you'd care to peruse some extensive bowling pages. (Sponsor must worship eyestrain. No longer does that multiple-title-tags garbage that takes so long to load, but now the server-push graphics are about as irritating as the much-hated <BLINK> tag.)

ABC
American Broadcasting Company does television and radio. They are a Mickey Mouse company (Back in the 1980's, people joked that ABC stood for ``Aaron's Broadcasting Company.'' The late Aaron Spelling was an executive producer, with creators Esther and Richard Shapiro, and some others, of Dynasty (1981-1989). That probably understates Spelling's importance, but I have a family connection to the Shapiros, so that's the way it's going to stay. We have an alternate Spelling entry anyway.)

In ``Brilliant Mistake,'' Elvis Costello sings

She said that she was working for the ABC News,
It was as much of the alphabet as she knew how to use.
but lately (1998-9) he's been writing lyrics for Burt Bacharach music. This is probably good news for the person or persons who enjoy the music of both. Hmm. Enough to fill a concert hall, apparently. One fan who left a paw print at amazon.com likes Elvis Costello's ``cleaver intellegint lyrics.''

More on ``Brilliant Mistake'' lyrics at the Cu entry, of course. Complete lyrics of the song here.

ABC
ArchBishop of Canterbury.

ABC
Argentina, Brasil, Chile. That's Spanish for (just guessing here) probably Argentina, Brazil, Chile. ``ABC'' was too hard to remember, so now Mercosur is used.

ABC
Associação Blumenauense pró-Ciclovias. `Blumenau Association for Bike Paths.' Blumenau is a city in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina.

The initialism ABC is also used in Brazil in reference to the manufacture of automobiles and possibly other stuff, but I can't seem to track it down. You're eager to know why I care. I care because someday I aspire to write a complete entry about the Brazilian politician called Lula, and Lula got his nickname (and his start in politics, as a labor activist) when he was a worker in the ABC industry.

ABC
Atanasoff-Berry Computer. Built by John Atanasoff and his graduate student Clifford Berry at Iowa State in 1939. A linear algebra solver. (Twenty-nine simultaneous equations, I think it was.) It operated in the basement of the Physics Building at ISU until 1942. Just for yucks, Cf. ABC.

ABC
Audit Bureau of Circulations. Sort of like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, but they put on their flak jackets and load their twelve-gauges if you're late returning your library books (vide CIRC desk). Maybe not. Do you feel lucky, punk?

You do? Okay, then, I guess the ABC is a national organization that keeps track of (``audits'') periodical distribution (``circulation'') rates, and maybe TV and other media, so advertisers can figure out how much they owe the media that carry their ads. It's a different national organization in different countries. (You can sort out the grammatical number agreement yourself; I need to get to sleep.) They're getting into the web advertising business, too.

It seems clever (or cleaver?) to them to offer an alternate expansion...
Authoritative.
Believable.
Credible.
Not to me.

See the international organization that masterminds the conspiracy of all the putatively independent national organizations: IFABC.

ABC
Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Channel 2. Known as ``Auntie'' (as is the BBC).

ABC
Automatic Binary Computer, completed in 1953. (Not to be confused with the famous ABC of a decade and a half earlier.) According to the Giant Computers file, this computer contained 1,200 tubes, 500 crystals, and 50 relays, and occupied 250 square feet.

ABC
An elementary programming language originally intended as a replacement for BASIC.

See full details of ABC and its implementations, with example programs, in The ABC Programmer's Handbook by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens and Steven Pemberton, (Prentice-Hall ISBN, 0-13-000027-2).
Also, ``An Alternative Simple Language and Environment for PCs,'' Steven Pemberton, IEEE Software, 4, Nº 1, pp. 56-64 (January 1987).

A major web resource for this language appears to be this one, maintained by Steven Pemberton.

ABC uses nesting by indentation and mixes terse shellish features with loquacious baby-programmer talk.

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes source code for two elementary ABC programs -- and after all, how often do I get to write ``elementary ABC''? Neumann identifies Amos, BASIC, Euphoria, Profan, and REXX as similar languages.

ABC
The first three letters of the Latin and English alphabets. Because the alphabet is such an elementary piece of knowledge, ``ABC'' is often used to represent something elementary or basic or initial.

The first three letters of the Greek alphabet are alpha, beta, and gamma (α, β, γ). If you rotate a capital γ (Γ), tipping it 45 degrees on its back, you can see the resemblance: the C is a rounded version of a wedge open to one side. The Romans borrowed the Etruscan alphabet, which the Etruscans borrowed from the Greeks living in southern Italy (hence from a ``Western Greek'' alphabet).

At each adoption, there was usually adaptation, and there were also evolutionary changes and reforms within the histories of individual languages. Rotation and other deformations of the letter glyphs were among the evolutionary changes. Another kind of evolutionary change was forced by phonetic changes in the language. In Latin, the sound represented by the third letter of the alphabet was originally some kind of ``hard-gee'' sound, but became devoiced into a hard cee (a k sound, though this too evolved further). A letter for the hard-gee sound was still needed, because the sound was retained in many words, but was no longer unambigously represented by the third letter. This led to a reform.

The Western Greek alphabets, and the Etruscan, had epsilon, digamma, and zeta as the next three letters. The epsilon essentially became our E, the digamma our F, and the zeta our Z. (The digamma is less known today because it was discarded from the Attic Greek alphabet which became dominant in regions where Greek ultimately continued to be written.) The reform consisted of discarding the Z, which was not needed in Latin at the time, and replacing it with a slightly modified form of C that is G. The Z was eventually added back on at the end of the alphabet when the Romans needed it for the many words that were being borrowed from Greek.

Everyone knows about the Alpher Bethe Gamow paper, which has its own Wikipedia entry. Basically, Ralph Alpher was working towards his Ph.D. under George Gamow at Cornell, and had written a paper on nucleosynthesis. The author line would have read R.A. Alpher and G. Gamow, but ``[i]t seemed unfair to the Greek alphabet to have the article signed by Alpher and Gamow only, and so the name of [his colleague] Dr. Hans A. Bethe (in absentia) was inserted in preparing the manuscript for print. Dr. Bethe, who received a copy of the manuscript, did not object, and, as a matter of fact, was quite helpful in subsequent discussions. There was, however, a rumor that later, when the alpha, beta, gamma theory went temporarily on the rocks, Dr. Bethe seriously considered changing his name to Zacharias.''

Gamow, who wrote the quoted text in his 1952 book, The Creation of the Universe, was of course well aware that the last letter of the Greek alphabet is omega. He was just making another pun, and some leeway is allowed. ``Bethe,'' however, requires very little. The name is pronounced as in German, so the th has a tee sound, and the final e has something of a shwa sound, so overall it sounds like the English pronunciation of ``beta.'' The only surprising thing is that -eta in Greek letter names is pronounced with a long a for the stressed vowel in North American English (just as in German). In Britain, the standard dialects make it a long e, as in Velveeta. (In the nonstandard dialects, I suppose the names of Greek letters may not occur very frequently, except perhaps in ``Catherine Zeta-Jones.'') In compensation, the standard dialects in Britain are nonrhotic, so Alpher sounds more similar to alpha.

The wordplay in the author line goes beyond the coincidence of echoing the beginning of the Greek alphabet. The main types of radiation associated with nuclear decay are alpha, beta, and gamma rays. Also, the hypothesis of the paper was that nuclei are generated in a step-by-step sequence loosely resembling progress through the alphabet. (The individual step in the process was the capture of a neutron to increase the atomic mass number. Different nuclei along these isobars could then be generated by electron or positron emission, or by electron capture.) Retrospectively, we know that Alpher's theory (the one in the alpha beta gamma paper) was superseded by Bethe's theory (he became interested in the topic and correctly hypothesized that nucleosynthesis of elements beyond helium took place in stars).

Less well-known is another close association between Gamow and the Greek alphabet, which I quote here from the recollections of É.L. Andronikashvili of the early 1930's, when he was a physics student in Saint Petersburg (then called Leningrad). (These appear in, and apparently were written for, Khalatnikov's book on Landau, pp. 60-62.) He and his brother used to attend parties at the house of, and organized by, the stepdaughters of the translator Isai Benediktovich Mandel'shtamm, a translator. There he first met Lev Davidovich Landau, called ``Dau,'' newly returned from three years abroad to teach at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute. (The older stepdaughter, Genia Kannegiser, was a mathematical physicist.)

  Dau was accompanied by his associates, also physicists: Bronstein (nicknamed `the Abbot'), Gamow (`Johnny'), and Ivanenko (`Dimus'), who was later excommunicated' -- that is, denied the friendship of Landau and even the right to be acquainted with him.
...   Gamow's wife was also present, a Moscow University student whom he had brought over from there. She too had a nickname, `Rho,' after the Greek letter ρ. Later, she became `Rho-zero' (ρ0). All this seemed quite pretentious.

Nowadays in physics, the letter rho most frequently represents resistivity or density. It doesn't seem especially flattering. Maybe she was a redhead. The ρ0 (``rho-zero'' or ``rho-nought''), of course, is a neutral meson. (The triplet of rho mesons can be regarded as excited states of the pion triplet.)

It seems that Gamow had the effect of making people think alphabetically in one way or another. James D. Watson (yes, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA) wrote a memoir with the title Genes, Girls, and Gamow.

Another person with a Greek-letter nickname was Eratosthenes (Eratosthenes of Cyrene). His nickname was Beta. Beta, the second letter of the alphabet, represented the number 2 in Greek numerals. The nickname alludes to his reputation as the second-best in all the various fields in which he worked.

ABCA
America, Britain, Canada and Australia. This has appeared in HSE documents, and if we keep quiet about it the Kiwis won't find out and be upset. I haven't seen ``ABCAN'' used anywhere.

ABCA
American Baseball Coaches Association.

ABCA
Antwerp British Community Association. It ``was exclusively British when founded in 1920 but is no longer so. Our strong and growing Anglophone association now exists to promote English language and cultural contact between all nationalities. It provides an opportunity for social contact which people, living mainly in the Greater Antwerp area, might want or need.'' The ABCA Clubhouse is located at Paardenmarkt 111, 2000 Antwerpen, which turns out to house the Belfry of BATS as well. Cf. BBCA.

ABCBP
American Board of Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology. One of various boards run by the ABPP.

ABCCS
AirBorne Communications, Command, and Control System. Specially equipped version of the C-130 military transport, coordinates air and ground forces.

ABCD
Agency, Board, Commission, or {Department|Division}. Government jargon used since at least about 2002 in Toronto, and possibly nowhere else.

ABCD
American-Born Confused Desi. A Desi (a subcontinent Indian) born in the US and (possibly only perceived as being) torn between traditional Indian culture and US culture. Also the title of a 1999 film about two ABCD's. Cf. HINA and NRI, and ethnically further afield, the probable model for the ABCD initialism: ABC.

A highly successful book I have seen billed as ``first-ever South Asian American coming-of-age story'' is Born Confused (2002) by Tanuja Desai Hidier. It was one of the books plagiarized by Kaavya Viswanathan for her cut-and-paste achievement How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life.

ABCD
Asymmetry, Border, Color, Diameter. Four basic warning signs of melanoma:
  1. -- Asymmetry. Skin discoloration in a shape that does not have a well-defined center. (Or, as nonmathematical physicians express it: ``if a line is drawn through the middle, the sides don't match.'' What ``middle''?)
  2. -- Border. Irregular shape. Not just asymmetric but with scalloped or notched edge.
  3. -- Color. Typically brown or black, and sometimes with mixes of red, white, and blue. How patriotic!
  4. -- Diameter. Larger than a quarter inch.

ABCD data switch
Four-way switchbox: data in or out from one side can be switched to data out or in, respectively, of one of four other devices. Common way for multiple machines to share a printer, or one machine with one serial or parallel port available to be connected to multiple peripherals. Not a device to challenge the mind, and not expensive, but handy.

abcissa
This entry is here because I can never remember how to spell abscissa.

ABCL
American Birth Control League. Founded in 1920 by Margaret Sanger. Name changed in 1930 to Planned Parenthood.

ABCMOS
Advanced Bipolar and CMOS (process technology). ``Advanced Bipolar'' means bipolar made using technology developed for CMOS.

ABC Museum
Alyce Bartholomew Children's Museum: For ages 6-12; 2921 Franklin St., Michigan City, IN; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturdays and by appointment Mondays through Fridays; (219) 874-8222; $2.50-$3.50.

All information subject to change without my noticing. This is a pretty remote corner of the glossary, I may not be back for a while.

ABCN
The American Board of Clinical Neuropsychology. Incorporated in 1981, its first president was Manfred Meier. The ABCN administered its first examinations in 1983 under ABPP supervision (it apparently did not officially become a member board of the ABPP until later that year), and awarded the first ABCN Diplomates in clinical neuropsychology the next year. The number of ABCN Diplomates (yeah, it's gotta be capitalized, like NAR Realtor) exceeded 300 in 1996, 400 in 1999, 500 in 2004, and 600 in 2007. This bores me just a little bit less than it does you because the whole time I'm writing, I'm thinking: ``Testing? Making up exams and proctoring and reading (or viewing the work samples) and grading them? That's the main activity of the ABCN and indirectly of the ABPP. It's the main source of stress for me when I teach. How can they stand it?''

In 1989 the ABPP designated the ABCN as the specialty council in clinical neuropsychology, and in 1993 the ABCN implemented a written examination as a requirement for specialty certification in clinical neuropsychology. This must be their secret: do everything in reverse order. Also, keep upping the requirements in order to keep the number of candidates from growing too fast. In 2002, a postdoctoral training program in clinical neuropsychology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was the first postdoc program in the specialty to earn APA accreditation. By 2005, postdoctoral training became a requirement for candidates with doctoral degrees earned after 2004.

ABCO
1-azabicyclo[2.2.2]octane

ABCU
1-azabicyclo[3.3.3]undectane

ABC-P, ABCP
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay. Some old trade agreement. See Mercosur.

ABCS
Antimonide-Based Compound Semiconductor. Refers in practice to heterostructures made from the InAs/AlSb/GaSb system, as well as the binary, tertiary, and quaternary alloys. The favored applications are in low-voltage technology for very-low-power low-noise amplifiers (LNA's). Here's a webpage that's highly authoritative because it's from an authority that spends mony to buy research on ABCS technology.

ABCS
Army Battle Command System.

ABCT
Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. New initialism of the old AABT (they dropped ``Advancement'' from the title). Another old B organization that has added a C to its name is AABP (now AACBP).

ABCTE
American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence. The awkward, ill-thought-out English on their website suggests that they may be trusted to maintain the same standards currently prevailing in the ``profession.''

abd
ABDom{ en | inal }. Medical terminology. (At least, I don't think butchers use this abbreviation in their patient work-ups.)

ABD
All-But-Dissertation. Facetiously: the degree before Ph.D. In the final stage, this may also be expanded ``All But Done.'' Of course, the final stage may be longer than all the rest combined, and possibly terminal.

There appears to be a support group for these people; I've seen their signs by the clinic:

``Students for Life.''

The TTBOMKAB entry mentions in passing a young woman who, in 1969, has been renting a cabin in upstate New York for ``several years,'' writing her dissertation. The story (nonfiction) is told by Philip Roth, who seems to imply that she was working on it for the four years they lived together starting in 1969. Call me impatient, but I think of this as not getting on with your life. What people with an ABD degree usually do is feel guilty and drive a cab or something.

Perhaps the most famous instance of an ABD that eventually led to a Ph.D. was the case of Frank Bourgin. In 1945, he received a letter stating the ``unanimous opinion'' of his Ph.D. committee that his 617-page manuscript needed the kind of work that could only be done if he quit his job and came back to the University of Chicago to finish it. With a family to support, he could not do this. Crushed and bitter, he put it away for over forty years, only looking at the box that held it on the eight occasions when he moved. Finally he looked at it again after he retired. The dissertation became The Great Challenge: The Myth of Laissez-Faire in the Early Republic (1989) (xxiv+246 pp.). This was not an ordinary ABD situation. Four decades later, it was hard to reconstruct what had happened, but it seems that Prof. Leonard D. White, member of the Ph.D. committee and chair of the department, had -- not to put too fine a point on it -- lied. White apparently reported the ``unanimous opinion'' of Bourgin's committee without in fact consulting the rest of the committee. The surviving member claims he never saw the dissertation. Bourgin's advisor was busy with wartime work in Washington, DC, and retired afterwards. He had proposed Bourgin's topic but gave him less help or supervision than was normal. The full story of how Bourgin was eventually awarded his Ph.D. in Pol. Sci. on June 10, 1988, is told in the preface and in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s foreword to that book (read the latter first, to avoid confusion).

ABDA
American-British-Dutch-Australian. Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands (and Belgium, Luxembourg, and France) beginning on May 10, 1940. The Netherlands received an ultimatum -- to surrender or have its cities destroyed. On May 14, Rotterdam was bombed, leaving 814 dead and 78,000 homeless; the Netherlands surrendered on May 15. Queen Wilhelmina and leading members of her government escaped to London, where a government-in-exile was established. Most of the Dutch Navy also escaped.

The Dutch fleet saw action in the Java Sea in late February 1942, where a combined ABDA fleet battled a Japanese fleet covering an invasion force approaching Java (part of the Dutch East Indies). The Allied fleet consisted of a cruiser from each country and some destroyers, and had no air support. The Allies were routed. Of the entire Allied fleet then operating in the Dutch East Indies, only four American destroyers made it back to Australia.

aBDC, ABDC, abdc
After Bottom Dead Center. See BDC.

Abe
Abraham. Abraham Lincoln preferred to be called Abraham rather than Abe, but even when he was president he often didn't have a choice.

Abraham was considered to have an unattractive face. During the famous debates with Douglas, when Douglas accused him of being two-faced, he replied by asking rhetorically, whether if he had another face, he'd be wearing the one he had on. While he was president a young girl wrote him a letter suggesting that he'd look better with a beard. He took the advice. Why didn't Mary Todd think of that?

Abe also had a lazy eye. Daguerrotypes or early photographs from the time of his presidency were generally ``corrected.''

Press pictures of Franklin Delano Roosevelt never showed his wheelchair or crutches. Television didn't either. (He attended a world's fair where an experimental TV system was being demonstrated, and became the first US president to appear on television.)

I decided to grow a beard a couple of years ago. It looked good when it was starting, but I'd have to trim it to Yassir Arafat length to keep it looking good. The main issue, however, is kissing. In Latin America, the saying is Un beso sin bigote es como un huevo sin sal. [`A kiss without a mustache is like an egg without salt.'] To judge by my experience here in the US, however, American women prefer their eggs without salt. I mean, it can't be me.

The title of Woody Allen's Bananas refers to a Central American banana republic that is the scene of much of the action. Back in Nueva York, the Woody Allen character's love interest Nancy is played by Louise Lasser (Woody Allen's love interest at the time). She leaves him because some indefinable ``something is missing,'' she doesn't know what. Some improbable accidents later, he returns to fund-raise in New York, a leftist guerilla leader in big-beard-and-mustache disguise. Nancy is attracted. In bed she screams ``That's what was missing!'' Still, as I noted (read the previous paragraph if you already forgot) this is the exception rather than the rule among the Anglos.

I suppose that the saying has added significance in Spanish, owing to the fact that huevo (`egg') is slang for testicle. In fact, a form of apparent hermaphroditism that arose from a spontaneous mutation a couple of generations back in the Dominican Republic (.do) was locally known as huevos a doce (`eggs at twelve'). We ain't talkin' midnight breakfast at Denny's here, capisce? Fetal androgen deficiency leads to male babies with apparently female external genital organs; testosterone surge at puberty produces male appearance and reproductive function (pretty much).

Consider the merkin.

I've often wondered if Sp. bigote is etymologically related to Eng. bigot, but I've never bothered to check. Okay, I just checked. Etymology uncertain.

Bananas -- now why would a sex-obsessed comedian and occasional ironist name a movie after a fruit? Is there a deeper reason? What kind of bananas? Give me 400 words; the exam ends promptly at 4:30. (This issue isn't addressed at the electrical banana entry, though Woody Allen is mentioned there.) Woody -- how did he end up with that name? His given name isn't Woodrow.

ABE
Acceptor-Bound Exciton.

ABE
Advanced Book Exchange. ``[T]he INTERNET's most popular service for buying and selling out-of-print, used, rare and antiquarian books.'' See also a select listing here.

Precise relationship to ABAA unclear, but in any case, while I'm having trouble reaching its server, the list of ABAA members on ABE is up.

ABE
Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering.

ABE
IATA code for Lehigh Valley International Airport (abbreviated LVI in road signs, located closest to Allentown, PA, USA, but the letters ABE reflect its traditional name, Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton Airport, for the three largest cities it serves. Here's its status in real time from the ATCSCC.

ABEF
Agri-Business Educational Foundation. The executive vice president of NAMA also serves as the president of the ABEF.

abele
A Eurasian tree, according to the OSPD4. It can be found scattered throughout the Scrabble forest. Plural form abeles.

ABELL
Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. Apparently now integrated into Literature Online (LION).

ABEND
ABnormal END. ``End'' in the sense of program run termination. I mean, it doesn't mean flat butt or anything.

Abend
German, `evening' (cognate, of course). Normal end of day.

To be fair, I should note that the end of the day for dating purposes has varied historically, and only recently become settled, for most civil purposes, as midnight.

Jewish religious dates are reckoned to begin at sundown. Thus for example, a Jewish holiday that in a particular Gregorian year falls on what is nominally September 1 is celebrated or observed beginning at sundown on August 31. The talmudic reasoning for this is based on the wording of the Genesis creation story, which includes a repeated formula translated ``and there was night, and day -- the first day.'' This is taken to imply that the day begins with nightfall. It makes a certain kind of sense that He created the Sun at night -- what was the alternative?

Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a lot of different places were considered as possibilities for a Jewish national homeland. The Soviets even allocated a place in the middle of southeastern nowhere and deported some Jewish volunteer settlers there. Other places seriously considered were in Africa, in Grand Island, New York, and, oh yeah, the bloody Middle East. Grand Island, NY, is very close to Canada. Parts of Canada are north of the Arctic Circle. If a place inside the Arctic Circle had been selected, then for some of the year there would be no sunset, wreaking havoc with Jewish holiday reckoning. I don't claim that this observation is original with me, and neither did Mordecai Richler. (I mean, he didn't claim it was original with him. I don't think he was even aware of me.) In his Solomon Gursky Was Here, Richler recalled the old proof that neither Judaism nor Islam could be universal religions: fasting for an entire day would kill the Arctic/Antarctic dweller. He had some fun with the implications of this for the Inuit.

Also, matzah trees probably don't bloom that far north. Traditionally, however, there's another explanation of how the Jewish homeland came to be where it is. After the Lord of the Universe brought His people out of Egypt (Mitzraim), He asked Moses (Moshe) where he would like to have the Jewish national homeland. You'll recall that Moses was a stutterer. This is probably the real reason why they wandered around in the desert for forty years. Moses wanted a land flowing with milk and honey and all, and he answered the Lord ``Ca... Ca-a... Cana... Cana-a...'' and the omniscient Lord of all creation said ``Oh, Canaan. No problem. So be it.'' Actually, what Moses was trying to say was Canada. Some years later, Britain and France clashed there on the Plains of Abraham.

Incidentally, a better transliteration for Canaan would be Cana'an. See the aa entry for more on that. And also, the Thirty-Second Medieval Workshop was hosted by the U of BC in Vancouver (24-26 October 2002). The theme was ``Promised Lands: The Bible, Christian Missions, and Colonial Histories in Latin Christendom, 400-1700 AD.'' Now back to the subject of the entry -- Abend...

Observational astronomers spend the night hours awake and would prefer to have all the records of a particular night correspond to a single ``day.'' For this reason, Scaliger's useful Julian day scheme was eventually extended by astronomers so that Julian days begin at noon (at the Greenwich meridian). Of course, this isn't very useful if you're observing in Hawaii, or even at the AAO. For more on Julian days, see JD entry.

This page shows where on earth you can get some shut-eye.

Abendländer, Abendlaender
German, literally `evening lands,' literarily `the Occident.' Like, you know, `the West.' Like Morgenlaender, the singular form is used only in the genitive.

aberemurder
Defined forthrightly in the always useful Pantologia (London, 1813) as
plain or downright murder; as distinguished from the less heinous crimes of manslaughter, and chance-medley. It is derived from Saxon æbere, apparent, notorious, and morth, murder; and was declared a capital offence without fine or commutation, by the laws of Canute, and of Henry I.

If you had the word murder already on the board, and five more common tiles on your rack... but no, the word does not occur in any of the three major Scrabble dictionaries. That just kills me.

ABET
Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. Gives accreditation to university programs in these disciplines. Arguably the single most destructive influence on Engineering education in the US, although the NSF is horning in on the action with seed money for fashionable foolishness.

Abf.
Abfahrt. German for `departure.' That a German word beginning with ab- should have as its English translation a Romance word beginning in de- is often no accident; cf. Abg.

ABF
Australian Bridge Federation. The largest of the four NBO's comprising the South Pacific Bridge Federation (SPBF -- Zone 7 of the WBF). In 2006, the ABF had 32,501 members. Interestingly, the NBO of New Zealand (NZCBA) had nearly half as many (15,050). Some further numbers to illumine this: the populations of Australia and New Zealand are about 21 million and 4.2 million, respectively. Whipping out my satisfyingly rigid slip stick (because it requires fewer keystrokes to bring up than the calculator app), I estimate that this yields an interest level of 4.387012.

AbFab
ABsolutely FABulous. A British TV series, 1992-1996.

ABFFE
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. I thought that perhaps the organization might date back to the struggles to get Henry Miller distributed in the US, but a Google search restricted to the site only turns up one Miller: Matt, the organization's treasurer.

In fact, ABFFE was founded in 1990 by the American Booksellers Association. They are a co-sponsor of Banned Books Week.

See also FEN.

ABFP
American Board of Family Practice.

ABFP
American Board of Forensic Psychology.

Abg.
Abgeordnete[r]. German: `[elected or appointed] representative.' A noun declined as an adjective. The form with final r is male. (For a slight discussion of this sort of noun, see Vors.) Abgeordneter also functions as a title, Herr Abgeordneter Litfaß and Frau Abgeordnete Litfaß serving for `Representative Litfass.'

Etymologically, Abgeordnete corresponds approximately to the English noun delegate, with ab- and de- both having a sense like `off, away,' so the person is one `sent away' (in Romance) or `ordered off' (in German). For a parallel instance, see Abf. [I should make clear that ordnen, of which geordnet is the past participle, is normally used in the sense of `organize, arrange.' It is cognate with English verb order, of course, which can be synonymous with command, but `command' is not a common sense of the German verb.]

ABG
Arterial Blood Gas.

Abh.
Abhandlung[en]. German, `paper[s], treatise[s].'

ABHAI
Association of BHaratanatyam Artistes of India.

AbhBerl
Abhandlungen der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. `Papers of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin.'

abhesive
Gesundheit! Oh, sorry, I thought I heard a sneeze.

An abhesive is a material that resists adhesion. This is the noun use of an adjective, of course, but you can figure out the meaning of the adjective from the meaning of the noun. I resist defining adjectives. Oh, okay: ``that resists adhesion.'' Happy now? ``Like teflon.''

AbhGött, AbhGoett
Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. `Papers of the Academy of Sciences at Goettingen.'

AbhHeid
Abhandlungen der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. `Papers of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.'

AbhKM
Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes. `Papers for Announcements about the Orient.'

The word Morgenlande is an archaism. At the time this word was used in ordinary speech, it meant what the English term the Orient meant: the exotic regions to the east of Europe, with a strong connotation of backwardness, technological and moral. That Orient included the Middle East (Near East) and the Far East.

Except in the genitive case, only the plural form of the German term was used. Landes is the genitive singular of Land. The form Lande which I used above is an archaic nominative plural; if the term were coined today the nom. pl. would have to be Morgenländer. You know, that ILL request is gonna take a while, so you've got some time. Why not amble over to the Morgenlande entry and read some more about this fascinating word? Oh wait, wait: you get to choose. I just thought of another German word with an interesting semantic history.

[column]

AbhLeip
Abhandlungen des Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. `Papers of the Saxon [as in Saxony] Academy of Sciences at Leipzig.'

For classicists, it would be short for Abhandlungen des Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-historische Klasse. (After the comma: `Philological-Historical section.')

[column]

AbhMainz
Abhandlungen der [Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse,] Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz. `Papers of the [Humanities and Social Sciences Section,] Academy of Sciences and Literature at Mainz.' [The section indicated in square brackets is of interest to classicists.]

AbhMünch, AbhMuench
Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, München, Philosophisch-historische Klasse. Abhandlungen. `Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich, Philosophical-Historical Section. Papers.'

ABI, A.B.I.
Acquired Brain Injury. Variably defined, but generally excludes prenatal injury, genetic defect, degenerative neurological disease, and disability stemming from mental illness. It probably includes acute alcohol poisoning. Since adjusting the definition of this general term does not materially advance or retard the ability to treat any brain injury, it can mean whatever you please.

ABI
Advanced (abbreviated A!) Bus Interface.

ABI
Alabama Bureau of Investigation. Led fo many yeahs bah th' lejunderuh Herb Hooovah, ah uhmagine.

ABI
Alcohol[ic] Beverage Industry. Cf. this other ABI.

ABI
Application Binary Interface. Software emulation of a distinct operating environment, allowing binaries of an application for certain operating systems on certain platforms to run under a different OS on a different platform (like MS-DOS programs on Mac).

ABI
Association of British Insurers. The trade association for the UK's insurance industry, representing about 400 companies and about 95% of the industry's business as of 2005.

ABI
Automated Broker Interface.

ABIAF
Association of British Independent Accounting Firms. The word order is an odd permutation of what one might expect: independent modifying British accounting firms. The order might be due to what seems to have been an earlier name of the organization: ``Association of British Independent Chartered Accountants.'' I'm sure there's a precedence chart somewhere showing that ``independent'' binds more tightly to ``chartered accountant'' than to ``British.'' The term chartered accountant alone describes an individual with a certain level of professional education or certification (like professional engineer or licensed practical nurse). The term independent chartered accountant, on the other hand, is a bit like the term independent scholar among academics: it communicates how the person does business. That makes independent chartered accountants an easily recognizable term that can be reasonably modified by a nationality, while independent British chartered accountants might not be so immediately parseable. Still, one wishes they'd gone with ``British Association of....''

ABIOS
Advanced BIOS.

ABJ
Adler-Bell-Jackiw. In 1969, S. Adler (Phys. Rev., vol. 177, p. 2426) and J.S. Bell and R. Jackiw (Nuovo Cim., vol. 51, p. 47) published their independent discoveries of a mathematical feature of four-dimensional field theories. The feature is known as the ABJ chiral anomaly, ABJ axial anomaly, ABJ triangle anomaly (infrequently), or just plain ABJ anomaly, and by any of those with ABJ absent or replaced by the names it represents.

ABJ
Austin (TX) Business Journal.

Abk.
Abkurzung. German for `abbreviation [of a word or phrase], shortening [of a meeting, for example], short cut.' The abbreviation Abk., as opposed to the word, occurs primarily in dictionaries, with the first sense given.

ABKA
American Boarding Kennel Association. Former name of the Pet Care Services Association (PCSA).

[column]

abl.
ABLative. One of the cases into which nouns may be declined in an inflected language. The Latin ablative case subsumes instrumental and locative cases, although there are a few rare words with distinct instrumental or locative form. (That is, it is inferred from other Indo-European languages, and from scraps of evidence within Latin itself, that Latin once had a more robust case system with separate instrumental and locative forms.)

Most prepositions in Latin take objects in the accusative or ablative case. [In the same way, pronouns that are the objects of prepositions in English are in the objective case. Thus ``you and I, or we'' give a gift, but a gift is given ``to you and me, or us.'' Obviously, English has a rather fragmentary case system, in which the subject and object forms of nouns and of the personal pronouns you and it are not distinguished.]

Noun phrases occur in various functions in a sentence, and not just as the objects of prepositions. The various cases in Latin are used to indicate these functions. For some cases, the function is quite straightforward. The vocative is used to address the named person. (Hence Shakespeare's Caesar calls out, ``Et tu, Brute.'' Brute here is the vocative form of Brutus.) There are vocative forms for nouns that you wouldn't normally address directly; Winston S. Churchill found this situation scandalous, but then he was always one to see the moral dimension in things. Similarly, the nominative indicates the subject of a sentence (this is typically the same as the agent), the accusative marks the direct object, etc. The uses of the ablative case are not so straightforward, and resist being summarized. Thus, Latinists like to (or in any case do) define various categories of ablative corresponding to various instances in which a noun phrase ought to be declined in the ablative case. These can get amusing. Okay, usually just mildly amusing. Come on, grin a little bit. We don't have a very extensive list yet. You can watch as it is built.

Or else you can go and watch paint dry. It's up to you.

ABL
Atmospheric Boundary Layer. Earth's PBL.

[column]

ablative of association
The ablative case when used for the noun or noun phrase that in English would typically be the object of the preposition with, when the action described by the verb involves some kind of spatial or metaphorical closeness. (These uses are conceived as deriving from the Indo-European instrumental case, which is merged with the IE ablative and locative cases in the case that is simply called the ablative in Latin.)

Charles E. Bennett's article, ``The Ablative of Association,'' on pp. 64-81 of the 1905 issue of TAPA, has the following initial footnote: ``This investigation has had regard to the [Latin] literature down to the time of Apuleius. While the lists of examples are quite full, it is not claimed that they are absolutely complete for all authors.'' Bennett agreed with those Indo-Europeanists who regarded the IE instrumental ``as having primarily a sociative force'' and sought to ``show that the range and frequency of the instrumental are much more extensive in Latin than is at present recognized. According to my observations it appears with verbs of joining, entangling, mixing, sharing, being attended, keeping company with, being accustomed, wedding, mating, piling, playing, changing and interchanging, agreeing, wrestling; also with adjectives of equality.'' I dunno -- it looks like he might have overplayed his hand.

To be in greater sympathy with this view, one may observe that the German preposition mit serves more of an instrumental function than the corresponding English preposition with. (They are almost certainly not cognates, but each overlaps more closely in meaning with the other than either does with any other preposition in the other language.) Specifically, I have in mind constructs like ``mit Bus,'' meaning `by bus.'

[column]

ablecti
Latin: a select body of ancient Roman soldiers (back when they weren't ancient) chosen from among those called extraordinarii. [Acc. to Pantologia (London, 1813)]. Wow! It kind of reminds me of Dilia's reaction when we went to see the movie Superman.

Hmmm. It just occurred to me that in Europe (in Germany and Italy, anyway), ordinarius professors are regular faculty, and extraordinarius professors are just adjuncts (like ``extras'' in a show). So maybe the ablecti weren't the best of the best, but at best only the best of the rest. I'll have to check back.

These confusions seem to happen a lot. A medieval epithet expressing great respect, and bestowed on very few, was stupor mundi. This means `wonder of the world,' but that's not exactly what it sounds like to the average English-speaker (you have to think ``stupefier, stunner' for stupor).

[dive flag]

ABLJ
Adjustable Buoyancy Life-Jacket. Early name for early versions of what have now been refined into neutral-buoyancy devices called BC's or BCD's. In Britain, apparently, the term is still used for horsecollar-style snorkel vests.

The horsecollar-style emergency life-jackets used to be called by a more evocative name. If I were singing ``Hey Nineteen,'' at this point I would insert a lyric about Mae West.

ablude
An English verb (from Latin abludo) meaning be unlike [acc. to Pantologia (London, 1813)].

abluent
An English adjective (from Latin abluens) meaning that has the power of cleaning [acc. to Pantologia (London, 1813)]. Cognate with ablution, a word so commonly used that I've even read it somewhere other than a dictionary.

ABM
Activity-Based Management. As opposed to inactivity-based management. It's a legitimate choice!

ABM
Anti-Ballistic Missile. This is not an adjective for those opposed to Ballistic Missile. It is really the noun

anti-(Ballistic Missile) Missile.

There is an ABM treaty between the US and something called the USSR, that limited the deployment of ABM systems to two areas (subsequently one).

ABM
Arbeitsbeschaffungsmassnahmen. Germany's public works and retraining measures for the unemployed.

ABM
Asynchronous Balanced Mode. (Acronym used in IBM's HDLC, at least.)

ABMAT
A Bit More About That. I can find no evidence that anyone on the web uses this valuable acronym yet.

ABMC
American Battle Monuments Commission. In existence since 1923, it botched the design of the World War II Memorial on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C.

ABMC
Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center.

ABME
Annals of BioMedical Engineering. The journal of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES).

ABMO
AntiBonding Molecular Orbital (MO). Typically labelled by a superscript asterisk.

ABMOT
A Bit More On That. Look, let's not get promiscuous with the acronym neologizing, okay? Use ABMAT.

ABMP
American Board of Medical Physics. Run by the ACMP, it provides board certification for medical physicists.

ABMP
American Board of Medical Psychotherapists.

ABMR
Atomic-Beam Magnetic Resonance. A good way to make hfs measurements in the atomic ground state and in low-lying metastable states. See I. I. Rabi, S. Millman, P. Kusch and J. R. Zacharias, Physical Review 53, 318 (1938).

(That's right, 1938. Modern English was already spoken in that epoch.)

ABMS
Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation.

ABMS
American Board of Medical Specialties.

Loosely speaking, this also has something to do with the plural of ABM.

ABN
Advance Beneficiary Notice. Refers not to the notice itself but to a specific form signed to acknowledge that notice has been received. Then again, that form is also known as the ``ABN notice,'' which might be an unusual case of merely apparent but not manifest acronym-assisted pleonasm (usually abbreviated AAP pleonasm). That is, the proper term may be ``ABN notice,'' with ABN a sort of metonymic reference to it, or an indication of the fact that being given the form to sign may be the only notice beneficiaries are given of their impending financial obligation. Alternatively, you could regard ABN as an acronym for Advance Beneficiary Notice notice, and ``ABN notice'' as an AAP pleonasm pleonasm. The actual notification, if it ever occurred independently of the request to sign a form, could be ``AB'' for clarity.

Fascinating glossary entry so far, eh?

After plowing through that paragraph, you're probably desperate for substantive information about just what the ABN (or ABN notice) is about. Medicare requires that a doctor or other health care provider have the beneficiary sign an ABN to indicate that notification has been given that certain services to be rendered will probably not be paid for by Medicare (whether because it considers the service medically unnecessary or because it simply doesn't cover it).

The notification must be given in advance of the services. I suppose that under Medicare rules, in the absence of a signed ABN the patient cannot be held responsible for charges not reimbursed by Medicare. The ABN requirement applies only to patients in the Original Medicare Plan. It does not apply to those in a Medicare Managed Care Plan. It also does not apply to those not in any Medicare plan. I mean--what are you, crazy or something? You're dreamin'!

Some of you who are blissfully ignorant may be wondering about the word ``probably,'' but I've got stuff to do. I'll be back here soon.

[dive flag]

abolla
According to Pantologia (London, 1813),
a military garment, worn by the Greek and Roman soldiers: it was lined, or doubled, for warmth. There seem to have been different kinds of abollas, fitted to different occasions. Even kings appear to have used them: Caligula was affronted at king Ptolemy for appearing at the shows in a purple abolla, and by the eclat thereof turning the eyes of the spectators from the emperor upon himself.

It seems that even then, dressing in inappropriate military garb was a major fashion statement. Today, the abolla is mentioned in the Fashion Glossary of the ICCF&D. (``Roman military cloak, worn short in length, over one shoulder and fastened at the throat with a fibula.'')

And yet the Forthrights Phrontistery -- International House of Logorrhea includes it in a list of obscure words, even though it's defined in at least three on-line reference works!

ABoR
Academic Bill Of Rights. Also called ``Students' Bill of Rights,'' etc. Intended to try to produce a semblance of political balance on college campuses, as if even high school faculty were not already radicalized. Favorable and unfavorable arguments (with some rebuttal) can be found at the SAF site. The American Philosophical Association, like most established (or ``establishment,'' as we used to say in our protesting days) academic organizations (``tools of the oppressor'' or ``organs of the system''; I like ``tenured flunkies for the new leftist man'') are strongly opposed (the APA's arguments here).

The ABoR document at the SAF is mostly preamble, but when it gets to the nitty gritty, it encounters the same problems that we are all familiar with from older affirmative-action programs intended to try to produce some semblance of racial balance, or equality of opportunity or...

The first ``principle'' reads: ``All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.'' Making use of the distributive property and simplifying, we can summarize thus: hiring, firing, promotion and tenure decisions shall be made ``with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives,'' yet without being affected by employee's ``political or religious beliefs.''

There are other principles. They are idealistic.

abortient
A term in botany for flowers without seeds (from Latin abortiens). Maybe the word you were looking for was...

abortifacient
A substance that induces abortion. Ancient and modern examples include laser and RU-486, resp. Another is mentioned at the NARAL entry.

abortion
I don't have time to go through a whole history of the thing, but here's somewhat recent (late April and May 2009) news on public attitudes about abortion in the US. The results seemed to represent a statistically significant deviation from the steady pattern of the previous decade or two.

A survey by the Pew Research Center found a sharp drop in the number of people ``who support legalized abortion,'' from 54% in August 2008 to 46% in a survey conducted from March 31 to April 21, 2009. Views on abortion are not entirely straightforward; most ``pro-choice'' people oppose infanticide and most ``pro-life'' people approve some form of birth control, and a majority of people favor legal abortion in some cases and not in others. So you'll want to look at the detailed survey results as reported by Pew and by Gallup. See also NARAL.

About
Most programs have a pull-down menu item or a button you can push that tells you the name of the program and who wrote it. This feature is labeled ``About [program name].'' If you want to find out what the program does, just click on Help and skim the first 100 pages of the manual, and there's a good chance you'll learn enough About it to make an educated guess as to what it does. I wouldn't skip over the section on changing the background color; that's often the only part of the help pages that mentions what kinds of input and output the software takes and gives.

About
The word ``about'' is often synonymous with ``approximately.'' I've noticed a context where ``about'' is more exactly parsed as ``we prefer not to say exactly.''

(This paragraph just states what everyone knows, to set context for the slightly interesting stuff in the next.) Packaged foods that are required by US law to bear a ``Nutrition Facts'' summary list a ``Serving Size'' and ``Servings Per Container.'' Often, the food product in the package comes in countable parts -- individual crackers, say, or a chocolate bar molded into rectangles so as to break into a composite number of pieces. For small packages, the serving size is sometimes the entire package, but in all other cases that I can recall, the serving size is chosen so that it does not divide evenly into the number of pieces, and thus yields a ``Servings Per Container'' value like ``about 7.'' The evident intent of this choice is to defeat the law's purpose: the need to do further arithmetic in order to obtain more meaningful numbers than something like calories-per-seven-twenty-fifths-of-the-package discourages consumers from taking advantage of the data provided. It seems at least plausible that the serving size is selected merely to yield reasonable-seeming numbers to the inattentive shopper. I guess it's even conceivable that the serving size is chosen so that rounding makes the inferred total numbers look better, to those who do the math.

Anyway, the ``About'' following ``Servings Per Container'' has become something of a reflex. Today I found something approximating proof of that: according to the label, Murray / Sugar Free Cookies / Vanilla Wafers reports ``nutrition'' facts for a serving size of 4 cookies, and there are ``About 9'' such servings in the package. The package didn't look like it contained wafers stacked even as few as 5 high, let alone 7 or 11. Sure enough, the package contained 12 stacks of 3 wafers each. ``Foiled,'' as they say, by non-prime factorization.

A. Bp.
Old abbreviation for an old ArchBishoP. There probably aren't many young archbishops.

ABP
Androgen-Binding Protein. Similar to sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG).

Abp., ABp., Abp
ArchBishoP.

ABP
Arterial Blood Pressure.

ABPN
American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, Inc.

ABPP
American Board of Professional Psychology. ``We are a major player in the profession's interest in specialization.''

ABPP
Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry.

ABPsi
Association of Black Psychologists.

abpsy
abnormal psychology. Pronounced `ab-sigh.' David L. Gilles-Thomas's lecture notes for a full course are available on-line.

I think that someone who studies abnormal psychology is called a normal psychologist, but I haven't had a chance to check that.

ABPT
Association of Blind Piano Tuners. I guess there's one less distraction that way.

It's not widely known, and it probably isn't even true, that piano is very popular in the mountain kingdom of Bhutan (.bt). In fact, piano is probably the national sport. Once, the King of Bhutan heard of a man with perfect pitch and judgment, the best piano tuner in the world: Oppur Knockety. (For the purposes of this entry, we're going to assume Oppur Knockety is blind. It has some resonance.) For a great reward, the King persuaded Oppur Knockety to visit the palace and tune the King's own piano. When he was done, the piano sounded true and wonderful, better than one could have imagined that a piano could sound, before one heard this one.

That night, there was a great storm, and the next day, when the King sat down for his morning exercises, the piano was painfully out of tune. The King called for his men to bring back the tuner, to fix the piano, but they returned with only his solemn regret...

Oppur Knockety only tunes once.

You know, this guy reminds me of King Frederick the Great. He was a great patron of the sciences. Leonhard Euler spent twenty-five years as a guest in Frederick's court, which I suppose is why one of the most famous early problems in topology is the seven bridges of Königsberg (first capital of Prussia), except that Frederick the Great ascended the Prussian throne in 1740, and Euler treated this problem in 1735. Oh well. At the end of WWII, East Prussia became Russian and Polish territory, and Königsberg became Kaliningrad, Russia.

Seven Bridges Road, sung in occasionally a capella harmony, was a hit for The Eagles in 1968. Steve Young wrote it about a road by that (unofficial) name that leads out of Montgomery, Alabama into idyllic countryside by way of seven bridges.

There's also a parkway called Seven Bridges Road in Duluth, Minnesota. It has gone by a variety of names. Samuel Snively, the fellow who had the inspiration first to build it, and who got most of the original road built in 1899-1900, wanted to call it Spring Garden Boulevard, but that name never caught on. It follows Amity Creek and was best known as Amity Parkway, but it was also called Snively Road. It originally had ten wooden bridges, but these and the road generally fell into disrepair, until 1911-1912, when it was renovated and the original bridges were replaced. The renovation plan called for stone-arch bridges to replace the wooden ones, but one of these was downgraded to a less decorative iron-pipe-and-cement structure. Of the nine stone-arch bridges, the two at the upstream (Western) end fell into vehicular disuse, hence the current name. But it was never called Ten Bridges Road or Nine Bridges Road. Some numbers have more romance.

You know, on the subject of romance, it says here in the Columbia Encyclopedia that in 1733 the future King Frederick II ``married Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, but he separated from her shortly afterward and for the rest of his life showed no interest in women'' (my italics). Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink.

In 2001 there was an incident in Bhutan involving royal marriage, and it turned out much worse. Oops, wrong Himalayan kingdom. It was Nepal.

As noted above, King Frederick II ascended the throne in 1740 -- he was known as Frederick the Great because his cynical, unscrupulous military adventures Greatly enlarged his kingdom. He was into all things French, and had a serious amateur interest in music. He played flute concertoes. As you may well imagine, in his court everyone absolutely loved flute concertoes. The King of Prussia was an absolute monarch.

The pianoforte (Italian for `gentle-strong') was invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1709. The original name, eventually shortened to piano, stresses the respect in which it was a major improvement over its predecessor the harpsichord: it is possible to vary the volume (and duration) of a note. The piano supplanted the harpsichord over the course of the nineteenth century, growing in popularity even as it was still being perfected. Gottfried Silbermann, the foremost German organ builder of the time, worked at perfecting the instrument. Frederick the Great was his greatest supporter and customer -- he was said to have owned as many as fifteen Silbermann pianos. So much for the Bhutan connection.

Fritz had his court in Potsdam (I guess that explains the Euler topology thing), where Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (a son of the great Johann Sebastian, and no mean musician himself) was Capellmeister (`chapel-, i.e., choir-master'). C. P. E. Bach was one of the first major composers to write for the piano. In 1747, J. S. Bach paid a visit to King Frederick's court and tried out all the pianos. A bit more on that the RICERCAR entry.

abr.
ABRidged. Abbreviation used in the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature and elsewhere.

Sometimes terms like ``abridged'' are used where ``almost completely discarded'' would convey a more accurate idea. A paperback volume in the Milestones of Thought series from the Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. offers a good example. The front cover bears the title The Anatomy of Melancholy, a woodcut of a melancholy person, and the name of the author, Robert Burton. Below this: ``Abridged and Edited by Joan K. Peters.'' This handy volume is xviii+129 pages long. Not quite buried in the back-cover blurb and an introductory note is the information that the unabridged work is 1300 pages long. (The original and this have about the same count of words per page, within a few percent; so the text really is compressed by a factor of about 10.)

ABR
Accredited Buyer Representati{on|ve}. Real estate brokerage role.

ABR
Acrylate-Butadiene Rubber.

ABR
The American Board of Radiology.

ABR
Available Bit Rate. A type of traffic management control defined within ATM. Appropriate for applications that send data in bursts and can wait for available bandwidth.

UBR (q.v.) and ABR are the two ATM ``best-effort'' service types, a sort of steerage class of data transmission, in which the network makes no absolute guarantee of cell delivery. In ABR, a minimum bit rate is guaranteed, and an effort is made to keep cell loss low.

ABRA
Asociación de Bancos de la República Argentina. `Association of Banks of the Republic of Argentina.' That's not banks as in the shores of the Río de la Plata. That's banks where you store your plata (literally `silver,' but commonly used as a synonym of dinero). Then when the economy collapses, the government finds ways to prevent you getting your money back, except eventually, and in officially as well as unoffically shrunken form. Argentines who really have money, of course, just keep the loose change in domestic banks and the bulk off-shore.

Of course, in principle it could also mean `association of [park] benches of the Republic of Argentina.' Managing money requires the exercise of sound judgment. In Argentina today, investing in park benches (and charging rent, collectable in hard currency) might be the way to go.

Spanish is one of those languages that, with no offense intended, physicists refer to as `highly degenerate.' Words have many meanings (acepciones). I suppose you could apply the same term to languages in which words have many spellings (which should be called heterographs). It's a transferred sense of the physics adjective degenerate (German vielfach), describing an eigenvalue (most often an energy eigenvalue) corresponding to more than one eigenstate. I don't mind giving clear and thorough explanations. It just happens that I don't.

In 1998, ABRA closed, after a fashion, merging with ADEBA (details there) to form ABA.

abra
Silver Polish coin (no, I mean a Polish coin made of silver). Seems to be out of circulation now. In 1813 or so, according to Pantologia, it was worth about one (English) shilling.

abra
Spanish, `open.' To be specific, it is one of the singular forms that occurs in the conjugation of the verb abrir (`to open'). For example, English ``that he open it'' would be translated ``que lo abra,'' and the command ``open the cadaver'' (whatever that might mean) becomes ``abra el cadáver.'' (That's the ``polite'' form.) It makes ``abracadabra'' oddly suggestive the first time one hears it. One might also think of ``abra cada brama'' (`open each rutting season' as a command rather than the sort of thing you would put as a sign at your campgrounds), but accentual stress falls on the first syllable of each of these three Spanish words. Of course, to most Spanish speakers the English word abracadabra mostly just evokes the word that has the same meaning in Spanish (written abracadabra) (also).

A near homonym of abra is habrá (the only phonemic difference is that the stress falls on the first syllable in the first word and the second syllable in the second word). Habrá is a form of the verb haber, and means, in certain contexts, `there will be' or `will have to.'

abra
Spanish noun for any of various sorts of opening (bay, dale, fissure, window pane) not described as an apertura.

abra
There used to be a duplicate entry here, inserted by accident. In order, however, to avoid wasting your precious time, we have ruthlessly removed it.

abracadabra
According to the Pantologia (London, 1813),
a magical word, recommended by Serenus Samonicuss as an antidote against agues and several other diseases. It was to be written upon a piece of paper as many times as the word contains letters, omitting the last letter of the former every time, and then suspended about the neck by a linen thread. Abracadabra was the name of the a god worshipped by the Syrians.

Thank God we've gotten away from all that nonsense!

ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACADA
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRAC
ABRA
ABR
AB
A

Abrams, Elliot
A WBEN weather reporter. Who did you think?

Actually, I've been away from Buffalo, and I've heard his name in Pittsburgh and around Ohio. Someone ought to look into this.

[Later:] It turns out that he provides weather reports for many different radio stations. His hardest job is keeping straight which personality he's supposed to use with which station.

abril
`April,' in Spanish and Portuguese.

Abril
The name of a Brazilian publisher. Verily clever. The cover of its magazine Veja has a small block of text in the upper right, with ABRIL in all-caps and the date in lower case (same font).

abs
ABdominal muscleS. They can be as tight as a drum, but the spare tire is stored on top, so you'd never know. To show them off you have to lose fat. To lose weight without loss of muscle mass, make sure you get enough dietary chromium (say 200 mcg/day) in a form that is biologically available (as the chelate: chromium picolinate).

Abs.
Absender. German for `sender.' Or `sender-offer' if you prefer. Cf. Abg.

abs, abs.
ABSolute. Generally contrasted with relative, or scaled, or normalized.... One less obvious and fortunately obsolete usage was associated with the old cgs unit systems, and is described at the ab- entry.

abs.
ABSolute[ly]. A grammatical term referring to modifiers (adjectives and adverbs). The absolute form of a modifier is the ordinary or noncomparative form, it states a property without indicating a comparison or degree. In English and other Germanic languages, the absolute form is contrasted with comparative (comp.) and superlative (superl.) forms. For example:
red (abs.),
redder or more red (comparative form),
and
reddest or most red (superlative form).

In prescriptive or ``school'' grammars, the absolute form of a modifier is more commonly called the positive form. In the literature of linguistics, positive and absolute are probably used to a comparable degree.

An absolute adjective is one that has no -- or logically should have no -- comparative forms. Dead is a pretty good example. One can get into arguments about this, but they rapidly get philosophical. Whether an adjective is absolute or not is a question of the assumptions underlying its semantics. These may not be shared, and one can question them, but we all recognize the humor or oddity of characterizing a woman as less pregnant or a quartet as fourer. Absolute adjectives are rarely called positive adjectives.

One of the more irritating semantic abuses is the description of some item being hawked as ``very unique.'' In principle, one could argue that uniqueness is not an either-or thing, that unique is not an absolute adjective but rather describes a quality more like unusualness. But we already have the word unusual, and the salesman doesn't want to use it. He recognizes that ``unique'' is a more powerful word, indicating something beyond merely unusual. Even that advertising whore has an inchoate sense that unique is an absolute adjective. (Give that man an ADDY.) His promiscuous, meretricious use of the word in a superlative form abases it, churning the vocabulary hierarchy and forcing us to establish new words for him to abase.

Grammatical rules are a bit like poetic scansion. Perfect meter in poetry, and perfect adherence to grammatical rules in prose, can become tired. A little deviation is spicy. But it is spicy only because the frame of order is present to play off of. It is a good thing occasionally to form the comparative or superlative of an absolute adjective. If you break the rule systematically, however, you find little joy left in the breaking, and the language poorer.

ABS, abs
ABSolute value. Common name for absolute value function, in computing and sometimes in mathematics [where |.| is more common than abs(.) is]. In computer programming languages ``abs'' may also be used for the modulus of a complex number.

One can compute the maximum function from the absolute value function and vice versa. For two real numbers r and s:

abs(r) = max(-r,r) .
max(r,s) = [ r + s + abs(r-s) ] / 2 .

Maximum functions of more arguments can be generated by successive comparisons from maximum functions of fewer arguments, using the fact that

max(r1, ..., rN, rN+1) = max( max(r1, ..., rN) , rN+1) .

Equivalent statements apply for the minimum function, since

min(r1, ..., rN) = - max(-r1, ..., -rN) .

ABS
Acrylonitrile/Butadiene/Styrene copolymer (a ``terpolymer''). Often described as ``high-impact.'' CycolacGE) is one. San Diego Plastics, Inc. has a short page of information on ABS.

Compare AAS.

ABS
AlkylBenzene Sulfonate.

ABS
Alternate Billing Service.

ABS
American Back Society. Passing by on my way to write another glossary entry, I'm a bit surprised I didn't make some remark about this entry when I first put it in.

ABS
American Bible Society. Offices at 1865 Broadway, sin city.

ABS
American Board of Sexology.

Alice Cooper's lyrics run through my mind -- ``I wanna be elected!''

ABS
American Board of Surgery.

ABS
Animal Behavior Society. ``The purpose of this society is to promote and encourage the biological study of animal behavior in the broadest sense, including studies at all levels of organization using both descriptive and experimental methods under natural and controlled conditions.'' I suppose anthropology should be a subfield.

ABS
Antilock Braking System. It sometimes occurs in the AAPleonastic form ``ABS Braking System'' (likewise in the language-disguised form ``sistema frenante ABS'' in Italian and Spanish). A much more common acronym AAP is ``ABS System,'' which has the advantage of also being redundant when ABS takes the German expansion ``Anti-Blockier-System.'' ABS operates by sensing a skid (one wheel turning much more slowly than others) and releasing the brake momentarily to reestablish traction. This all happens repeatedly, on a tenth-of-a-second time scale. It demonstrably improves braking on slippery surfaces, and so in principle it ought to reduce accident rates. However, early data fail to show this; it's a mystery why. One hypothesis is that people get overconfident. I have to admit that I have sensed a tendency on my own part to go a little faster on slippery surfaces and rely a little on the ABS. But I realize now that that is quite wrong. I don't have to admit it. I'll take moral hazards over road hazards any day.

Allied Signal Corporation, based in Morristown, NJ, started talks with ABS manufacturer Bosch of Germany in Fall 1995, in hopes of collaborating to improve the performance of its brake division, which manufactured ordinary brakes. They ended up selling the division to Bosch.

Allied has facilities in the Buffalo area, but that's not where it's at; Allied had the brake stuff from the former Bendix Corporation. (You know: George Schultz's old company; you remember George Schultz -- one of Reagan's Secretaries of State? One who didn't say ``I'm in control here''?) Anyway, Bendix used to be a big presence in the South Bend area -- there's even a local ``Bendix Woods'' county park. At the end of Bendix Road, just north of the Amtrak station, there's an empty shell of a building that used to house the brake factory. Bosch uses some of the building for office space. Tim -- he lived upstairs from me -- works there. He's a mechanical engineer (MechE).

I guess you really didn't need to know about Bendix Woods, huh?

A rare alternative expansion of ABS is ``automatic braking system,'' but it's best to leave that for the rail and air transport braking systems, which are not antilock systems.

ABS
Artificial Biosynthesis of Sugar.

ABS
Average Busy Stream.

ABSAME
Association for the Behavioral Sciences and Medical Education.

[phone icon]

ABSBH
Average Busy Season Busy Hour.

Traditionally, Mother's Day has the heaviest phone traffic of the year.

ABSCISSA
A Bore that Should Cease Is Stupid, Silly Acronyms. This acronym was coined by Bob Cunningham as an expression of contempt for contrived acronyms; he mentioned it on a.u.e on August 27, 2003. The acronym's expansion is useful as a mnemonic for the spelling of abscissa. This also works with the more natural-sounding silly-stupid order.

absissa
This entry is here because I can never remember how to spell abscissa.

ABSM
American Board of Sleep Medicine.

absolute zero (of temperature)
The following explanation of absolute zero and zero-point energy is slightly modified from one dashed off with the intention of being comprehensible by a high-school graduate. I am informed that I overshot the target level. FWIW...

Zero temperature and zero-point energy are related concepts, but the first can be described independently of the second.

Briefly: a system is said to be at absolute zero temperature when all possible energy has been sucked out of it.

Classically (i.e., within a classical physics/classical mechanics description), you expect that you could always extract all the kinetic energy from a system and leave it at minimum potential energy. Quantum mechanically, we know that's not true. Zero-point energy is the classically unexpected minimum energy, or minimum kinetic energy.

You can see zero-point energy as a consequence of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. For simplicity we consider a system that consists of a single particle in a potential well, but the argument generalizes (see STAFF for a less ordinary instance of the same concepts). Suppose you did manage to remove all the kinetic energy from a system. Then the momentum would be known exactly (it would have to be zero). But if the potential energy has a minimum at a particular point (the usual situation except in vacuum or symmetric situations) then the position at absolute zero would be known exactly too -- the particle would be exactly at the place where the potential is minimum. So if you could remove all the energy, you would know both position and momentum exactly. This violates the uncertainty principle, so the tentative assumption is wrong. Conclusion: you cannot remove all the kinetic energy from a system. This argument can be quantified to give estimates of the zero point energy that are good to exact.

To understand all the energy in macroscopic systems, you have to use thermodynamics or statistics, because there are too many (microscopic) degrees of freedom. The only exception is zero temperature, when there is so little energy that the number of accessible states (talking QM, of course) is small. So certain calculations that don't involve statistical ensembles (explicitly as stat mech or implicitly as thermo) are said to be done at ``zero temperature,'' even though nonzero temperature only makes strict sense as a concept if you do have thermal ensembles.

Calculating the ground state energy of a hydrogen atom is an ordinary non-statistical quantum mechanics problem. When you recognize that mechanics is zero-temperature statistical mechanics (as partly explained in the previous paragraph), you realize that the ground-state energy of an atom is its "zero-point energy." Here is a mathematical problem to avoid discussing. I said earlier that the sero-point energy is the minimum [QM-attainable] energy or the minimum kinetic energy. For a classical atom, the minimum energy is minus infinity (atoms are classically unstable -- they collapse), so the zero-point energy, measured from the classical minimum, is positive infinity. So "zero-point" energy is not always well-defined. If you stick to systems that are classically stable, like springs or phonons, you can say zero-point energy is kinetic energy. When QM is the reason for a classical system to be stable at all, z.p. isn't k.e.

ABSP
Association of British Scrabble Players.

absurdity
Absurdity is in the details.

A bald absurdity is just an error. A detailed absurdity is Humor.

Also in the details: God, the devil.

Saint Augustine wrote, `I believe because it is absurd.'

Many churches provide weekly messages of spiritual uplift on their outdoor marquee billboards. It is reliably and corroborably reported that some time before the millennium, a church marquee in Nashville proclaimed the following consolation:

THE FART OF GOD
IS DIVINE WIND

ABT
Advanced Backplane Technology.

ABT
Advanced BiCMOS Technology.

ABT
Air-Breathing Threat. Jets and cruise missiles, as opposed to ballistic missiles (rockets).

ABT
American Ballet Theatre.

ABT
The Aramaic Bible (The Targums).

ABTA
According to a 2006 article in Travel Weekly (iss. 1810: March 3, p. 15), a spokesman defending the ``existing structure'' said ``ABTA has always been a broad church.'' Yes, yes, but what church precisely? Oh: Association of British Travel Agents. All right, then; I guess they specialize in pilgrimages.

ABTA
Australian Baton Twirling Association. ``Twirling Australia.'' Gee, with the Coriolis forces changed around, it must be pretty tough to switch hemispheres! Associated with the WBTF.

ABTE/ETL
Advanced BiCMOS Technology / Enhanced Transceiver Logic.

ABTUK
Associated Baton Twirlers of the United Kingdom. For similar organizations, see the majorette entry.

ABU
Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union.

Abu Amar
Yassir Arafat's nom de guerre. Amar is Spanish: `to love.' I don't think that's what it means in Arabic.

ABV
Alcohol [percentage] By Volume. Expanded in speech, 46ABV is ``46 per cent alcohol by volume,'' often with per cent or alcohol implicit. In clean-fun-loving Utah, a beverage with more than 4% ABV (that's just 3.2% ABW) qualifies as ``liquor.'' Utah is only 62.1% Mormon, and probably not all Mormons are srict teetotalers, so perhaps Utah has the highest rate of locally-defined ``liquor'' consumption in the US.

Utah is the US state with the lowest per capita alcohol consumption. In April 2014, the NIAAA released estimates based on 2012 alcoholic beverage sales (I suspect they didn't correct for state-border-crossing rum cakes), and Utah was at 1.37 gallons (per year, I guess). The next lowest-imbibing states were Arkansas and West Virginia (1.81 gal.). Hmmm. This sounds like it was based on excise tax collected.

ABVP
American Board of Veterinary Practitioners, Inc.

ABVS
Audit Bureau of Verification Services.

ABVT
American Board of Veterinary Toxicology. I understand that some dogs can eat a little bit of chocolate.

ABW
Alcohol By Weight.

ABWA
American Business Women's Association. (I checked and yeah, "businesswoman" is much more common than the spelling with a space or hyphen. Please let me know if you can think of any even less useful information that I might include in this entry.)

ABWR
Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (BWR). Expresso!

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Abzu
Guide to internet resources on the ancient Near East. They sort of explain what abzu, an Assyrian or Sumerian word, means. I bet they don't even know themselves. Now Abzu (in existence since 1994) seems to be ``ETANA's guide to the ancient Near East on-line.'' (ETANA has been in existence since about 2000.) Who pays the piper calls the tune.

.ac.
(Domain code for) ACademic institution. Used under national domains that are organized hierarchically both under the British (.uk) scheme (second-level domains a mix of two- and three-letter abbreviations: .ac., .co., .gov., .net., .org. -- it's so English to be unsystematic) and under the Japanese (.jp) scheme (.ac., .co., .go., .ne., .or. -- it's so Japanese to be systematically obscure).

I'm aware that .ac. is used (in addition to the U.K. and Japan) in Austria (.at), Belgium (.be), Costa Rica (.cr), Israel (.il, South Korea (.kr), New Zealand (.nz), and South Africa (.za).

Under national domains that don't have an .ac. second-level domain, like those of France (.fr) and Germany (.de), universities very often have domain names indicating the type of institution.

Most US universities, and a number of non-US universities, have subdomains in the .edu top-level domain.

AC
Access Control. (In a token-ring system or any other network with some kind of collision avoidance.)

A/C
AcCount.

Ac
ACet{ ate | ic | yl }. Productive, as in AcOEt (ethyl acetate) or PVAc (polyvinyl acetate).

AC
Acromio-Clavicular (joint).

Ac
Actinium, element number 89. Not to be confused with the related An (a generic actinide) or unrelated Ac (acetate, etc.) Learn more (about actinium) at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

AC
Activated Carbon. Not ``activated'' in the Arrhenius sense.

Ac
ACts of the Apostles. An NT book.

ac
ACute. Medical abbreviation for a word that as used means approximately rapid and not chronic. Nothing to do with a cute anything. More closely related to ack.

The conventional sense of acute is broader, and includes extreme, or severe.

AC
Adenylate Cyclase.

AC
Adult Contemporary. A music category tracked by BillBoard. Somewhat slow -- music and popularity shifts both. For a song to stay six months at #1 on the AC chart is not unusual. Savage Garden had its hit (``Truly Madly Deeply'') at #1 for most of 1998. For contemporary adults who understand that lay is the infinitive of a transitive verb, 1998 was a galling year.

AC
Advanced CMOS (logic family). Also ACL. One-micron technology. Cf. ACT. This page from TI.

AC, A/C
AirCraft. That's what it means in aviation industries, but there seem to be other meanings as well.

AC, A/C
Air Conditioning. (The target condition is cooler.) Another short form of this term is eakon, the Japanese word meaning the same thing. See perm for a small number of other examples.

AC, ac, A.C., a.c., A.-C., a.-c.
Alternating Current. For information on the various abbreviations, see the DC entry.

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AC, a.c.
Ante Cibum. Latin, `before meal.' Lower-case form is standard in medical prescriptions.

A.C.
Antes de Cristo. Spanish and Portuguese, `before Christ' (B.C.). Italian is similar. Cf. D.C.

AC
Anthony and Cleopatra. It ended badly, but eventually Shakespeare made a play about it, so it's okay. The abbreviation usually refers to the play, at least in the sort of stuff I read.

AC
Application Context.

A-C
Asbestos-Cement.

You know, this looks like a somewhat slow-news part of the glossary, so I'm going to take the opportunity to lay out our grand plan. Briefly, our long-term objective is to reach the point where every entry is necessary for every other entry -- i.e., every entry is reachable by a sequence of links from any other entry. Just think how convenient it will be! With just a few thousand mouseclicks, you'll be able to get from any entry to any other entry. Wow and amen. To achieve this vision in a short amount of time, we're going to start inserting a few more links whose relevance is not immediately evident.

A.C., a.c., AC
Asociación Civil. Spanish for `civic organization.' The abbreviation appears at the end of the names of many Mexican nonprofits. It seems to be a part of legal terminology there, a strictly delineated class of nonprofit corporation. I've seen organizations with A.C. or its expansion in the names of one organization each in Argentina, Bolivia, and Venezuela. I suspect that in these cases the term is simply descriptive in the usual loose way and does not have the legal significance it has in Mexico, but that's just a guess.

AC
Assistant Commissioner. Assistant police commissioner, at least.

-AC
Automatic Computer. Popular ending on early computer names. See Woz entry for list.

AC
Axiom of Choice.

As you may have noticed, none of the AC entries is for a word as such, but rather for an abbreviation pronounced as an initialism (typically ``ay cee'') or a symbol. Hence, none of them is a valid Scrabble® word. Gratifyingly, all three major Scrabble dictionaries agree. Robert Frost observed that writing blank verse is like playing tennis without a net. Playing Scrabble with all marginally defensible words allowed is similar sport.

ACA
Air Care Alliance. ``[A] nationwide league of humanitarian flying organizations whose volunteer pilots are dedicated to community service.''

ACA
American Camping Association. Consider spending your Winnebago vacation at Chéticamp, in exotic but not-too-exotic Canada. See the NS entry in particular. Yes, go! Read it. Persistence is rewarded.

ACA
American Cartographic Association. Name of an old member organization of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM). Around the turn of this century, the ACA disappeared and a new member organization emerged in its place, called the Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS). It had been my impression that as part of this process, the Geographic and Land Information Society also disappeared. Possibly some members of the GLIS switched to the new CaGIS, or perhaps something more interesting happened, but the GLIS persists.

ACA
American Chiropractic Association.

ACA
American Communication Association. ``American'' in the continental sense -- Western Hemispheric.

ACA
American Council on Alcoholism. (Don't let that ``on'' fool ya'. They're agin' it.)

ACA
American Counseling Association.

ACA
American Crystallographic Association. Web site provided by the Hauptman-Woodward (Medical Research) Institute. (Used to be the Medical Foundation of Buffalo.)

ACA
Amputee Coalition of America. ``Our Mission: To reach out to people with limb loss and empower them through education, support, and advocacy.'' Did they have to use the expression ``reach out''? It reminds me of the dating-game parody in ``Kentucky Fried Movie.'' The third contestant ignores the question and instead starts spouting the slogans of the personality cult of the local leader. He's on a roll, it looks like they may let him live, but then he concludes his peroration with a call for the crowd to give their fearless leader (present for the show) ``a big hand.'' The leader lacks a right hand. Oops.

ACA
Anisotropically Conductive Adhesive.

ACA
Association Canadienne d'Acoustique. The CAA, q.v.

ACA
Association of Canadian Advertisers.

ACA
Association of Canadian Archivists.

ACA
Association of Chartered Accountants. Unh-unh. You want the ACCA.

ACA
Atlanta College of Art.

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ACA
Atlantic Classical Association (of Canada).

ACA
Automatic Circuit Assurance. A PBX feature to help identify malfunctioning trunk lines. This is not the usual kind of trunk (vide TCT) but a tie trunk (between two PBX's) or a PBX trunk, which connects the PBX to a commercial central office.

ACA
Automobile Club of America.

acac
ACetylACetonate. CH3COCHCOCH3.

Cf. ack-ack.

ACACC
Association des Cartothèques et Archives Cartographiques du Canada. See ACMLA. Also see ack-ack, because you only go around once in this life, so you've got to grab for all the gusto you...this is beginning to sound like a beer advertisement.

ACACD
American College of Addictionology and Compulsive Disorders. It's not exactly a ``college'' in any of the usual senses. It's a vendor of courses in continuing education originally taught primarily by Jay M. Holder. ACACD and Holder have earned the attention of Quackwatch. Featured treatments include hammering on your spine and acupuncturing your ear. Linked from their list of schools unaccredited by any credible accreditor, here are ``Some Notes on the Activities and Credentials of Jay M. Holder, D.C..'' Read'em and weep. You might suppose that a barbaric monstrosity of a word like ``addictionology'' would clue people, but ACACD is still in business. As of this writing, they're planning to hold an event in Las Vegas, May 22-25, 2009. If this ``medicine'' doesn't make you sick, see this AAA entry.

ACAD
American Conference of Academic Deans. (Note that, with very little effort, this could be made into a perfectly irritating little XARA.) ``ACAD members are current and former deans, provosts, academic vice presidents, and other academic [low-lifes and trouble-makers] at colleges and universities inside and outside the US.''

This isn't meant as a criticism, but it's interesting to note that ``inside and outside the US'' is not uninformative. And that's true whether or not ``inside'' and ``outside'' are understood as the mathematical interior of a proper set and its complement (so their boundary in ordinary topologies is a nonempty closed set).

According to Aerosmith's ``Living On The Edge,''

There's somethin' wrong with the world today --
The light bulb's gettin' dim.
There's meltdown in the skah - ah - eye!

Personally, I would have preferred nonsense syllables. I mean -- nonsense syllables that don't sound like they're supposed to mean anything. Nonsense syllables that don't mention Chicken Little. Ideally, it would be an instrumental with or without howling noises. They also state: ``Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah....'' Yeah, well: living in the edge -- now there's a challenge.

academism
In the English-speaking world, this is recogized as a variant of academicism. In Japan, however, academism is the standard term. I'm not sure whether it's wasei eigo or just an accident of some sort.

ACAG
Anti-Censorship Action Group. A South African NGO merged into FXI in January 1994.

ACAOM
Accreditation Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. Formerly the National Accreditation Commission for Schools and Colleges of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NACSCAOM), which was established in June 1982 by the Council of Colleges of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (CCAOM).

ACAP
Aviation Consumer Action Project.

I never thought of myself as a consumer of aviation service. Is this something that might get used up? Get a load of me -- I'm consuming aviation!

In an alternate world, Nick is bouncing the cash drawer in and out. ``Hey, get a load of me! I'm givin' out wings!''

Cash registers were originally invented to make sure the hired help didn't embezzle. The bell was added to make non-use of the register obvious (by silence).

ACARS
Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System. Somewhat less common (roughly a quarter of the ghits) is the expansion with the singular-form ``communication''; I don't know which -- if precisely one -- is official.

ACAS
(UK) Arbitration and Conciliation Advisory Service.

ACAT
Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology.

ACATS
(US) Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service.

ACAUS
Association of Chartered Accountants in the United States.

ACB
Adjusted Cost Base. A precise technical term in Canadian income-tax computation, specifically for computing capital gains amd losses. It's the total cost of an asset, adjusted to uh, in a way so as to, uh... It's the usual impenetrable taxation mess. Here's one mutual fund's futile attempt to show how simple it all really is. Revenue Canada (which isn't called Revenue Canada any more) obfuscates it here.

The expression ``adjusted cost base'' is also used loosely elsewhere for total cost base and average cost base.

ACB
American Council for the Blind. Their pages don't have a lot of fancy graphics, I notice.

They claim to be ``the nation's leading membership organization of blind and visually impaired people.'' They also claim that ``[i]t was founded in 1961 and incorporated in the District of Columbia'' as if this was anything I had a hankering to know. People should have a sense of proportion!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ACB
Association of Clinical Biochemists. It ``was founded in 1953, and is one of the oldest such Associations in the world. Based in the United Kingdom, it is a professional body dedicated to the practice and promotion of clinical science. The Association has medical and non-medical members in all major UK healthcare laboratories, in many university departments and in several commercial companies. The links with its Corporate Members leads to a fruitful relationship with the clinical diagnostics industry. The Association liaises with and is consulted by many national and international organisations on issues relating to Clinical Biochemistry.''

ACB
Average[d] Cost Base.

ACBL
American Contract Bridge League. Main organizer of duplicate bridge clubs and tournaments in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Bermuda.

Bermuda?

ACBL ``is the governing body for organized bridge activities and promotion on the North American continent'' as far as the WBF sees it. That is, the ACBL is the WBF's zonal organization for zone 2, the second-largest zone, membershipwise, after Europe (vide EBL).

There's a separate organization called the American Bridge Association (ABA). In the bad old days, ACBL was for whites and ABA was for blacks. Both still exist as independent leagues.

ACBP
Associations Comprehensive Benefits Program.

I found this entry and the next while trying to see if there wasn't a bomber version of the ACFP.

ACBP
Atlantic City Beach Patrol.

ACBSP
Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs. There is a clear pecking order among the three main business-school accreditation organizations in the US, and the order coincides with the alphabetical ordering of their acronyms. AACSB is the most stringent and prestigious, and has granted accreditation to only a fifth or so of US B-schools. AACSB accreditation requires that the faculty perform research, and -- just trust me on this -- this is a requirement that many schools focused particularly on teaching find difficult to meet. (A school's prestige also depends greatly on the original research performed there.) ACBSP (of this entry) is used by ``mid-range'' schools. IACBE also offers accreditation. AACSB and ACBSP, but not IACBE, are CHEA-recognized.

ACBSP
American Chiropractic Board of Sports Physicians. The name seems to imply that chiropractics are physicians.

Acc
ACCommodation. Medical term for what you need, conditional on your spending time at a medical convention. No wait! I think I garbled that. Maybe it's a conventional term for what happens when you spend a long time with a medical condition, and your body adjusts. Like favoring your gimpy leg. One of those definitions is probably right. I'll get back to this entry later.

ACC
Accident Compensation Corporation. As this now-empty page used to say, ACC ``administers New Zealand's accident compensation scheme, which provides personal injury cover for all New Zealand citizens, residents and temporary visitors to New Zealand. In return people do not have the right to sue for personal injury, other than for exemplary damages.'' Well, ``in return'' there's that and also the little matter of ``ACC levies.''

ACC
Adaptive Cruise Control. Its principal ``feature'' is that it slows down to maintain distance from the vehicle ahead. As the late Dale Earnhardt would have said, ``better soak a rag in kerosene and wrap it around your ankles to keep the ants from eating your candy ass.''

ACC
Air Combat Command.

ACC
American Crafts Council.

ACC
The Animal Concerns Community.

ACC
Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

ACC
Arab Cooperation Council. Headed by an Egyptian, headquartered in Amman (Jordan). Did Iraq really never stop being a member?

ACC
Joyce ACC?

ACC
Atlantic Coast Conference. This is the kind of conference where academic institutions present the results of their research in a form of multimedia presentation called ``games.''

ACC
Austin Community College.

ACC
Australian Copyright Council.

ACC
Autoclaved Cellular Concrete.

ACC
Automotive Composites Consortium. A consortium within USCAR. Formed in August 1988. It's about polymer composites.

ACCA
Advisory Committee on Council Activities. A standing committee of the NCEES (that ``Council''). ``Provides advice and briefing to the Board of Directors on new policy issues, problems, and plans that warrant preliminary assessment of policy choices and procedures. Consultants shall have served on the Board of Directors. Consists of a chair and members from each zone--one is a land surveyor.''

ACCA
Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce of America. Founded in 1919, it became a member of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States (founded 1912). The ACCA served some of the functions, particularly for wartime government-industry coordination, that the MAA served earlier. After WWII, the ACCA changed its name a couple of times, and is now known as the Aerospace Industries Association of America, Inc. (AIA).

ACCA
Association of Chartered Certified Accountants.

ACCC
American Council of Christian Churches.

ACCCIM
Associated Chinese Chambers of Commerce & Industry Malaysia. Cf. MCCM.

ACCE
American Chamber of Commerce Executives. This is the name that survived the 2003 ``merger'' of the ACCE and the National Association of Membership Directors (NAMD). NAMD became a division of ACCE and was renamed the National Alliance for Membership Development (NAMD).

acceleration pedal
Misspelling of exhilaration pedal.

ACCELS
American Council for Collaboration in Education and Language Study. Sounds so much more two-way and respectfully cooperative than the ``American Council of Teachers of Rooshyan'' (ACTR) that gave rise to it, and to which organization it is closely tied. (They share a website.) Broader implied agenda, too. ACCELS is described as having ``become a leader among all U.S. organizations in the administration of U.S. government-funded exchanges in the humanities, social sciences, economics, business, law, public administration, and educational administration.''

Oh great: in 1998 there was a reorganization. ACTR and ACCELS became councils under an umbrella organization called ``American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS.'' Frequent name changes and the creation of multiple sealed acronyms (or names that, confusingly, may or may not be sealed acronyms) are usually a sign of poor planning or at least poor branding, but the group claims here that it's a sign of success. During this period of great success, Russian has maintained US high-school student enrollments in the range of 10 to 15 thousand. (Due to a surge in Japanese language study, Russian fell from sixth-most-studied foreign language in US high schools to seventh.)

accent
Here is a supply of accents:
Acute: ´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´
Grave: ```````````````````````````
Unsorted: ´`´``´```````´°´´```´"´``´`
In case of emergency, smash screen and affix as needed.

Vietnamese has upwards of forty (40) (!) distinguishable vowels. You better believe Vietnamese are not always fastidious about accents. Vide VISCII. (Okay: what happens is that the vowels carry diacritical marks to indicate tone. I think it's fair to assign the tone to the vowel. English and German don't have this kind of semantic tone; the tone is used quasisyntactically to indicate questions or assign emphasis. Both languages have about 14 vowels in the standard dialects.)

Seriously, I find that sometimes (like right now) I'm on a public machine that has been cleverly sabotaged to prevent me from easily entering special characters. For such moments, it's useful to have those characters together to cut and paste from a single place.

For Spanish, I need
¡ ¿ Á É Í Ó Ú á é í ó ú ü ª º Ñ ñ
Maybe this will turn out to be more convenient over time:
¡¿ÁmásÉnéstÍpísÓnósÚrúngüi
1ª 2º Ñañ güe ación

German:
Ä Ö Ü ä ö ü ß
ÄuÖlÜberschäuönülaß

Japanese transcribed to Romaji:
â î û ô ê

acception
An old form of the word acceptation. In both forms, the word refers to meanings: acception is either the action or practice of accepting a meaning for a word, or a word's accepted meaning. It tends to be implicit that the acception of a word is singular, that all of the accepted senses of a word cohere in some way to a single inclusive sense: definitions of the word invariably refer to ``the meaning'' rather than ``a meaning'' of a word. If Anglophones didn't expect most words to have a single essential meaning, but instead expected multiple unrelated meanings, then the meaning of the words acception and acceptation would probably have evolved into something like that of their Spanish cognate acepción.

I should probably concede that there are a couple of subtle difficulties here: To discuss how many meanings a word has, one has to try to be precise about what constitute distinct meanings, and what constitute distinct words. If one can't answer the first question, one can't say whether a word has multiple meanings. If one can't answer the second question, one can't say whether the different meanings belong to the same word. What is worse, the question of distinguishing meanings complicates discussion here more fundamentally: one could regard English acception and Spanish acepción as having the same meaning, and claim that only the contexts differ. This is probably one of the worst entries in which to ponder this issue, since the words being examined are part of the vocabulary of the discussion. (Philosophers call this ``building a boat at sea.'') When I discuss it, or find a discussion, at some other entry, I'll place a link to that discussion here.

The second difficulty, what one means by the word word, is not so straightforward to address as one might at first suppose. There is some support for views at opposite extremes. For example, different spellings usually imply different words, but some English words have multiple accepted spellings. Moreover, it is accepted to say that the different conjugations of a verb are different forms of a single ``word'' (e.g., eat, eats, ate, eaten, eating). (You guessed right, I'm eating this, I mean writing this, on an empty stomach.)

Back later.

ACCHAN
Allied (i.e. NATO) Command CHANnel.

ACCI
Australian Computing and Communications Institute.

ACCIS
Automated Command and Control Information System.

ACCJC
Oh -- you want the WASC-ACCJC.

ACCN
Activated Cloud Condensation Nuclei.

ACCNA
Articulating Crane Council of North America. ``[F]ormed to promote and serve the common interests of articulating crane manufacturers in the development and sale of safe, efficient and useful products''; became an NTEA affiliate in fall 1992.

accordion
Remember, you can't spell accordion without accord. Just don't mention it to Honda.

Actually, the name accordion is somewhat curious. I would have thought that it was somehow parallel to harmonium. That instrument, invented by Alexandre-François Debain circa 1840, takes its (French and identical English) name from the Latin word harmonia (< Gk. harmonios, `harmonious'). At least one other instrument was, in fact, named on a similar pattern. The melodeon (commoner US usage, based on the inferred Greek original) or melodium (British) takes its name from the French orgue mélodium. The latter term was coined by J. Alexandre, who purchased the right to make harmonium-type instruments from Debain in 1844. Debain stipulated that the name harmonium not be used. These instruments were reed organs (they used air pressure from a foot-operated pump).

There was also a short-lived German Melodium developed by H. Bode and O. Vierling of Berlin. It was a ``monophonic electronic keyboard instrument,'' which I suppose means it played only one pitch at a time and would therefore, have been more appropriate for playing melodies. Bode performed on the instrument on radio and in theatre and films, but in 1941 the parts were apparently cannibalized in work that led to the Melochord.

So back to the accordion. A forerunner of the accordion was invented in 1821 by Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann, and in 1829 the Accordion (also Akkordion) was patented in Vienna by Cyrill Demian (not Debain).

One of the fellow German-Jewish refugees that my mom knew in Argentina back in the 1950's was a fellow who had been a concert pianist in Germany, iirc. A pianist, anyway. He went looking for work as a musical instrument salesman, and a merchant told him there wasn't much demand for pianos, but accordions sold well, and as the accordion was another keyboard instrument, the man wouldn't have any trouble picking it up. He picked up the accordion, and he never looked back.

I presume that the popularity of the accordion in Argentina is bolstered by its importance in music for tango, the national dance. Accordionists play a role in tango orchestras that string bass players do in Chicago jazz: they are required to emote crazily. When Styx performed ``Boat On The River'' for a music video in 1979, both the string bass and accordion players were cool, but then it wasn't jazz.

Accordion music is also important for movies set in France. Accordion background music means the scene is set in France or a nominally French area like the French Quarter of New Orleans. The 2011 movie Hugo was set in 1930's Paris, and has been described as Martin Scorsese's ``tribute'' and ``love letter'' to silent movies, which just goes to show how far ``paean'' has fallen from currency. I don't think there were any accordions audible or visible in the aggressively 3D opening sequence, but it certainly took me in: I was momentarily taken aback when the first words were eventually spoken in English. Perhaps the British accents played a role in this, but it's not easy to rerun the experiment with North American accents. It is needless to say, and I'll say it anyway, that any southern accents (southern US, Indian, Australian) would have been a severe distraction.

account
A popular word among philosophers. They often write that they want to ``give an account of'' a topic under discussion. I guess a philosophical account is something less than an explanation or even a description, but something that might seem to add up.

Most fields of scholarship generate terminology that helps them to do their work, but in philosophy the work is giving accounts, so the terminologies are largely an end in themselves. Philosophy is about generating and displaying terminologies. Different philosophies use different terminologies that have essentially no points of contact between each other. Every major German Idealist philosopher created his own terminology, and because the terms did not have a clear meaning, if any, they couldn't be translated and had to be borrowed into other languages. This is why so many German philosophical terms are in use in English. Same thing with Greek.

Although I have been encountering the ``give an account of'' locution for years whenever I would venture into the morass (a word with an almost perfect spelling), the particular thing that inspired me to write about philosophical terminology here was Empirical Philosophy of Science: Introducing Qualitative Methods into Philosophy of Science (Springer, 2015). The ``qualitative'' methods of the title are not meant to be contrasted with quantitative methods; they are contrasted with thinkological methods: ``Qualitative methods are gaining popularity among philosophers of science as more and more scholars are resorting to empirical work in their study of scientific pracitices.'' I love that ``resorting'': In desperation because methods not based on observation have failed to give a satisfactory account of how scientific practices are practiced, philosophers have been driven to use other ``methods, such as interviews and field observations.''

In the introduction, the editors don't say, but come as close as one can reasonably expect to saying, that even some philosophers consider a nonempirical approach absurd. All this really means, as the editors also come close to admitting, is that philosophers of science are trying to horn in on the turf of sociologists of science. I suppose that ``scholars of'' will always seem like parasites on ``doers of,'' but this really is beginning to look like an infestation.

ACCP
Alliance for Cervical Cancer Prevention.

ACCP
American College of Chest Physicians.

ACCP
American College of Clinical Pharmacology.

ACCP
American College of Clinical Pharmacy.

ACCP
The Association of AS/400 Corporate Computing Professionals, Inc. An all-volunteer, ``non-profit organization of San Francisco Bay Area professionals'' that wisely omitted the machine name (AS/400) from its organization name, and is now gracefully transitioning to The Association of iSeries Corporate Computing Professionals, Inc. (ACCP).

ACCPR
Adjacent Channel Coupled Power Ratio. Specifically a measure of interference rather than noise.

accrual date
An interest accrual date is the date that interest charges on a loan begin to accrue. Outside of civil suits, the context is usually adequate to allow this to be called simply an accrual date. In torts, the accrual date is the date of the action or event causing the injury for which a claim is brought. (``Injury'' is used in the technical sense -- encompassing personal injury, loss, damage, etc. for which claimant seeks to recover damages.)

ACCS
Air Command and Control System. (NATO acronym.)

ACCT
Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television. It must have seemed a clever acronym at some point, but the website only uses ``the Academy'' (and ``l'Académie'').

acct.
ACCounT[ant].

ACCU
Association of C and C++ Users. ``...a non-commercial organisation based in the United Kingdom [so book prices are in the exotic unit of pounds; then again, that's how many of us measure the value of books] and run by people interested in the C family of programming languages.''

accuracy enhancement
This is a term occasionally encountered in the field of microwave measurements. It's an accurate-enough but nevertheless offensive synonym for ``calibration.'' (The instrument calibrated is a network analyzer.)

accused of allegedly
Accused of. People with an uncertain grasp of their language might think that since words have meaning, more words have more meaning, so pile it on! Then again, maybe they don't think. In fact, when redundant or inappropriate qualification is added to an expression that is accurate without it, the fact of the qualification typically adds only information about the speaker or writer, rather than about the subject described. And the information is not good.

In this instance, moreover, the more verbose version is generally wrong. People are not generally accused of allegedly doing anything. Cf. high rate of speed.

[phone icon]

ACD
Automatic Call Distribut{ion | or}. Please hold. Calls are answered in the order received. (``Your call will be answered in the order that it was received.'')

ACDA
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency of the US government. The ACDA was established by an act of Congress of September 26, 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2561); it became part of the State Department on April Fool's Day of 1999. An archive of the old ACDA site formerly located at <http://www.acda.gov> is now maintained as part of the Electronic Research Collections (ERC) of historic State Department materials by the federal depository library at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In the Clinton administration, the former ACDA came under the policy oversight of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, its activities split among four bureaus: Arms Control, Nonproliferation, Political-Military Affairs, Verification and Compliance. The State Department maintains ``a permanent electronic archive of information released prior to'' dubya's inauguration. The current (April 2003) page for that Under Secretary seems to imply that the Bureau of Verification and Compliance reports to the Under Secretary but is not under that official's policy oversight. (This probably reflects its intended independence as the source of reports to Congress, including the ``President's Annual Report to Congress on Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control Agreements.'')

AC/DC
A Rock group. This site has lyrics to some of the songs.

The editorial we used to use the expression ``AC/DC'' to mean `swing[s] both ways.' We meant ``swing'' in a highly specific way.

AC/DC can also refer to the standard alternatives in electric power: alternating and direct current (AC and DC, resp.). In Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and probably quite a few other Romance languages, AC/DC suggests the standard alternatives in dating, but not swinging.

ACE
Accelerated College Enrollment. Thanks to the Huskins Bill, North Carolina community colleges can offer ``college courses'' to high school students, usually on their high school campuses. SCC, for example, offers Precal Algebra and Precal Trig to high school juniors and seniors.

This is brilliant! Given that community colleges award ``college credit'' for what is essentially remedial education in high school subjects, why not begin remediation before it's necessary?

The next bright idea: cut out the junior-college middleman! Allow high schools, usually on their own high school campuses, to offer HS-level courses to high school students! Brilliantissimo!

ACE
Accumulated Cyclone Energy. The ACE index is normally described as ``a wind energy index.'' It is defined as the sum of the squares of the estimated 6-hourly maximum sustained surface wind speed (in knots) for all named systems while they are at least of tropical-storm strength. If the overall velocity profile of any storm scales approximately linearly with the maximum sustained surface wind speed, then the ACE index ought to scale approximately with the total kinetic energy of the cyclones. The ACE index is normally stated not in square knot units (I had to write that) but as a percentage of its median value.

ACE
Advanced Certificate in Education.

ACE
Advanced Composition Explorer. A space mission, not some atonal composer.

ACE
Advanced Computing Environment. Same as obsolete computing environment, in a couple of years.

ACE
Alliance for Catholic Education. Established in 1994. You think that just because I get brochures about this in my mailbox, I'm gonna type stuff in? You got another think comin'.

ACE
Alliance for Clinical Education. Self-described as a ``multidisciplinary group formed in 1992 to enhance clinical instruction of medical students.''

ACE
Allied (i.e. NATO) Command Europe.

ACE
American Council on Education. Holds its annual meeting in February.

ACE develops the GED tests, which allow someone to demonstrate high-school-level academic proficiency. They were originally created by ACE for the United States Armed Forces Institute, to help WWII veterans, but are now used very widely.

ACE
American Council on Exercise. Some of these ACE's must cross paths occasionally. This ACE, like ACSM, certifies trainers.

ACE
Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme. A naturally-occurring enzyme. There is a class of drugs called ACE inhibitors, which inhibit the action of ACE. ACE inhibitors are used to treat a variety of conditions, but mainly high blood pressure and other heart-related problems such as congestive heart failure (CHF). ACE is sometimes misexpanded as ``angiotension-converting enzyme.'' Stick with the acronym if, like me, you barely know what you're talkiong about.

ACE
Antiradiation Missile Countermeasure Evaluation.

ACE
Award for Cable[casting] Excellence. Explained at the CableACE Awards entry, you'll be sorry to know.

ACEA
Association des Constructeurs Européens d'Automobiles. `European Automobile Manufacturers Association.'

ACEC
American Consulting Engineers Council. Changed its name to become the ACEC.

ACEC
American Council of Engineering Companies. Self-described as ``the only national organization devoted exclusively to the business and advocacy interests of engineering companies.'' Offices in Washington, D.C. The same organization is still often referred to as the American Consulting Engineers Council. I haven't been able to track down a press release or announcement of the name change, but on the basis of newspaper citations, the Consulting-Engineers name has been in use since at least the 1970's, and the Engineering-Companies name was first used not much earlier than June 2001.

ACEC
Associazione Cattolica Esercenti Cinema. Italian, `association of [Roman] Catholic film practitioners.' In June they hold a ceremony bestowing leone d'oro (`golden lion') awards.

ACEEE
American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

ACEHSA
Accrediting Commission on Education for Health Services Administration. The link anchored here on the expansion is hardly under construction yet (in May 2006), though the domain name has been owned by ACEHSA for many years. Try this site for some institutional history.

ACEI
I don't know what this stands for, but perhaps by a further thoughtful perusal of this document, you may be able to figure it out.

ACE inhibitor
A drug that lowers blood pressure by inhibiting the action of ACE. Demonstrated to prevent or slow the progression of kidney disease in diabetics.

ACEIP
Association Canadienne des Étudiants et des Internes en Pharmacie. English: CAPSI.

aceite
A surprising Spanish word. All the major Romance languages have words derived from the Latin verb acere, `to taste sour.' Spanish does too (generally via French): ácido is `acid' and `sour,' acérbico is `acerbic,' acre is `acrid,' vinagre is `vinegar,' etc. (For more etymological details, see the acetic acid entry.)

The surprising thing is that aceite, which also refers to a fluid added to salad, is not related to those words. Aceite (like azeite in Portuguese) means `oil' and `olive oil.' Besides Spanish and Portuguese, most major Romance languages take their word for oil from Latin oleum. This root gave rise, mostly through French, to the English words oil and olive, and hence to olive oil (and, for that matter, the name Olive Oyl). The systematic chemical suffixes -ol and -ole arose from the fact that, before there was any clear understanding of microscopic chemical structure, virtually any fluid other than water was liable to be called an ``oil.'' Old Spanish had the word olio, meaning `[olive] oil,' but it probably would have evolved into a near homophone of ojo (`eye') in Modern Spanish. Spanish got aceite from the Arabic word zaite. (The initial a- presumably represents the Arabic definite article al.) Spanish also has the words oliva and olivo for the olive (fruit of the olive tree) and the olive tree, respectively. For the fruit, however, the word aceituna is much more common than oliva, while for the tree, olivo is the standard word.

ACEI-WNY
Association for Childhood Education International of Western New York.

acepción
This is a key word in Spanish, exactly the sort of exception that proves a rule. The word can be translated `sense,' but the only thing that an acepción is ever the sense of is a word, and it is more precisely translated as `distinct meaning.' In writing this glossary I often write sense and wish I could use the sharper tool of a word like acepción. I'd even be willing to get out in front and introduce an appropriately spelled version of the word into English, but it has seemed too late, or too early: an old word acception (q.v.) already exists with a closely similar but crucially different meaning.

The main thing that one can say about acepeciones in Spanish (as opposed to what one can say, as above, about the word acepción itself) is that typically, Spanish words have a lot of them. I have fun with this at various parts of the glossary. (See ABRA, for example.) It seems natural to me that Spanish would have a word like acepción -- it's needed. Moreover, appropriately, the word acepción has only una acepción.

acento gráfico
Accentuation is a prominent aspect of Spanish orthography. Acute accents are used primarily to indicate stress. There are simple rules that determine where the stress should normally occur if not explicitly noted (on the penultimate syllable if the word ends in a vowel or the letter n or s; on the last syllable otherwise). Hence, the accent is only marked if the stress falls elsewhere than the rule would indicate, to distinguish homonyms with stress that follows the rule, and in a very few other instances. In order to distinguish stress from the mark indicating it, the two are usually called acento gráfico and acento prosódico.

ACER
Advisory Committee on Environmental Resources.

ACerS
American CERamic Society.

ACES
Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society.

acetal plastic
Polyacetal (ACL).

acetate plastic
PolyVinylAcetate. (Abbreviated PVA or PVAc).

acetic acid
Active ingredient in vinegar. Created from alcohol by our friends, the acetobacter bacteria. For most of human history, vinegar was the strongest acid known.

The term ``acetic acid'' is about as etymologically redundant as it sounds. The Latin verb acere, `to taste sour,' yielded the word acetum, `vinegar.' It also yielded an adjective acidus > French acide, meaning `sour.' The word vinegar itself comes from the Old French vyn egre, from the Latin vinum, `wine,' and acrem, accusative of acer, `sharp.' (Never mind those final ems. They were already being elided in Late Latin. Obviously, the same colection of acer words yielded the English words acerbic and acrid. The Old French egre or aigre yielded the English eager, now applied to persons, with a somewhat different sense than the original French word. The word keen is not quite capacious enough to cover the earlier and current senses of eager, when applied to living beings, but the way a knife can have a keen edge suggests the connection between sharpness and the current meaning of eager.)

All three major Scrabble dictionaries accept acetum and its nominative plural aceta. The OSPD4 explains that it means `vinegar.' Sure -- in Latin. Even the OED doesn't list acetum as an English word. Look, as long as we're going down this road, can't I use the genitive singular aceti?

acetyl
The radical CH3CO derived from acetic acid by the removal of its hydroxyl group (cf. acyl):
                      H C
                       3 \
                          \
                           C == O
                          /
                         /

acetylsalicylic acid
2-acetyloxybenzoic acid. Aspirin.

ACF
Access Control Field. (DQDB acronym.)

ACF
Access Coordination Function.

ACF
Administration for Children and Families. A component of the US DHHS.

ACF
Advanced Communication Function. IBM acronym meaning: ``Yes! Your hopelessly old-fashioned host-centric legacy system can learn new tricks! Keep it, and soon you'll have to be buying year-2000 solutions from us too!''

ACF/NCP
Advanced Communication Function/ Network Control Program (NCP)
ACF/TCAM
Advanced Communication Function/ TeleCommunications Access Method
ACF/VTAM
Advanced Communication Function/ Virtual Terminal Access Method (VTAM)

ACF
American Culinary Federation.

ACF
AutoCorrelation Function.

ACFAS
L'Association canadienne-française pour l'avancement des sciences. (`French Canadian Association for the Advancement of Science.')

ACFP
Association of Christian Fighter Pilots.

There was a Wrangler Jeans commercial on TV during 2001 that sounded a patriotic theme. Music accompanied the words ``Some folks are born, made to wave the flag / Ooooh -- they're red, white, and blue.'' Those are the opening lines of ``Fortunate Son,'' a Vietnam-era protest song by CCR. The song continues ``And when the band plays `Hail To The Chief,' / Ooooh, they point the cannon at you.'' It's not the celebratory patriotic song that it starts out sounding like. Perhaps ACFP might have considered using a carefully edited version of ``Sky Pilot'' in the same, uh, spirit: ``You're soldiers of god, you must understand / The fate of your country is in your young hands.'' As it happens, ACFP has its own theme song -- ``Brothers In Arms.''

I love this stuff, because Jesus is Love. Incidentally, the last line of ``Sky Pilot'' goes ``Remember the words `thou shalt not kill'.'' This is not a precise translation. Both of the Hebrew versions (at Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17) use a word that should be (and elsewhere in the Bible usually is) translated `murder.' The wording of the KJV repeats that of the Coverdale Bishops' Bible of 1535. Coverdale didn't know Hebrew, so this is probably an English translation of Luther's German translation (which at both places uses töten, `kill') or borrowed from one of Coverdale's friends, such as Tyndale. In any case, the prescription of capital punishments elsewhere in the Bible makes clear that not all killing is proscribed.

The words kill and murder had pretty much the same semantic ranges in Elizabethan English (``Early Modern English'') as they do today. Besides fealty to the original, however, another goal of the KJV creators was to preserve English that had become familiar. (The same motive probably explains why kill has continued to be used in some of the repackagings of the KJV -- like the ASV -- that have been marketed as ``new translations.'') Certainly, they understood the plain meaning of the original text, and might have changed the wording if it had occurred to them that anyone might be confused. At the time, however, a Christian would no more have supposed the commandment to forbid any killing of humans than to forbid killing of any animals. It was a question of how much of what might be implicit needed to be in the translation. I doubt that anyone before the twentieth century seriously suggested that the commandment was meant to forbid all killing of humans. That interpretation is only possible for those who are thoroughly ignorant of the Bible.

ACG
Association for Corporate Growth. You figure it's yet another consulting outfit, but it turns out to be a nonprofit.

ACGA
American Corn Growers Association. ``The American Corn Growers Association is America's leading progressive commodity association, representing the interests of thousands of corn producers in 28 states. Since it's [ah -- I knew there had to be an apostrophe mark around here somewhere!] inception in 1987, the ACGA has worked tirelessly to protect farm income and rural communities. The ACGA recognizes that farmers need to have the opportunity to be rewarded for their time, investment and risk.''

ACGA
Association for Clay and Glass Artists of California. Not abbreviated ACGAC. The closer you look, the smaller it looks. It's really mostly a San Francisco Bay Area group. Perhaps they have territorial ambitions, in the grand tradition of the ``Continental Army'' of the united states of the mid-Atlantic seaboard of North America.

ACGE
Accreditation Council for Gynecologic Endoscopy, Inc.

ACGIH
American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists, Inc. No, not ``Government and.'' Originally, the organization was for government personnel involved in industrial hygiene. Now membership is open to ``all practitioners in industrial hygiene, occupational health, environmental health, or safety.'' It was originally called the NCGIH (National ...). The name was changed in 1946. I guess they only change their name when necessary. Cf. AIHA.

ACGME
Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

ACGP
American College of General Practitioners in Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery. Old name of ACOFP, q.v.

ACGQ
Association des Chirurgiens Généraux du Québec. French: `Québec Association of General Surgeons.' Now known as l'Association québécoise de Chirurgie. Along with the name change there was also a change of acronym and URL.

ACGQ
Association des cadres du gouvernement du Québec. This might be translated `Québec Association of Government Officials.' I don't know if there is an official (or officials') translation.

Ach, ACh
AcetylCHoline. Important neurotransmitter.

ACH
AdrenoCortical Hormone.

Ach!
German interjection meaning `ah' or `aw.'

A few centuries ago the pronunciation of Ach could have been rendered agh in English, but agh! now means something more like aieeee or ack.

In real life, precision is often impossible in principle.

ACH
Air Changes per Hour. A measure of ventilation. If a pollutant (or perfume, for that matter -- if there's a difference) enters the interior environment at some rate R per hour, and the ACH is n, then the interior environment continually harbors an amount R/n of whatever-it-is, which for a moment we'll regard as a solute.

Strictly speaking, the R/n statement above is true only under the assumption of strong mixing. That is, it is assumed that the solute is uniformly dispersed in the interior environment, so air exhausted contains a concentration equal to the average concentration in the interior. It also assumes that there are no other sinks for the solute. A sink could be a loss of solute through reaction, precipitation, condensation, or adsorption to solid surfaces. If it's not a solute -- if it's in suspension rather than solution, then technically it could not come out of solution, which is what ``precipitate'' normally means in technical non-meteorological usage. We could say it might settle out.

ACH
Association for Computers and the Humanities. An international professional organization for people working in computer-aided research in literature and language studies, history, philosophy, and other humanities disciplines, and especially research involving the manipulation and analysis of textual materials.

In 1998 ACH had a joint conference in Hungary with ALLC. In 2001 they have one at New York University with ALLC. This is part of a pattern described at the ALLC entry.

ACH
Automated ClearingHouse. A network that provides electronic funds transfer services.

ACHA
American College of Hospital Administrators. Now known by the superior acronym ACHE.

In Spanish, there is no word spelled acha, but hacha, q.v., has the same pronunciation.

ACHE
AcetylCHolineEsterase.

ACHE
American College of Healthcare Executives. Oh, Bravo! Bravo! Very clever. An acronym so good it hurts.

What I want to know is whether this rhymes with FACHE® (Fellow of the ACHE). An ACHE Diplomate is a Certified Healthcare Executive, or CHE®.

ACHE was earlier known as the American College of Hospital Administrators.

ACHR
Advanced Course in Hardware Retailing. ``Knowledgeable employees increase sales!''

What a plausible concept! For details, simply become an NRHA member.

ACI
After Clean Inspection.

ACI
American Concrete Institute.

ACIA
L'Agence canadienne d'inspection des aliments. As you realize if you read French, that means `agency for the ailments of the Canadian woman inspector Des.' Des is obviously the French form of the English woman's name Desiree. ACIA in English is CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency).

ACIA
Asynchronous Communications Interface Adapter. A UART. An example is the 6850 communications chip used by the MC68000.

ACIA
Automated Calibration Internal Analysis System.

[column]

ACICS
Augusta County Institute for Classical Studies. ``[B]ased in Virginia's beautiful Shenandoah Valley,'' it is ``a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to advancing the knowledge of the ancient Greco-Roman world on the elementary school level.''

This reminds me of Disraeli's infamous comment about his wife.

``The centerpiece of the Institute is its student program, known as LatinSummer. LatinSummer, a summer enrichment program for students in grades three to five, is a joint project of ACICS and Augusta County Public Schools. It is one of the largest of the County's many summer programs. Each year, LatinSummer accepts approximately 100 students from the Augusta County public school system. These students then take part in two weeks of exciting, hands-on classes covering topics such as Mythology, Roman Culture, Classical Latin, and Conversational Latin. The students also participate in an activity period each day, which allows them to delve deeper into Classics through hands-on and critical thinking activities.''

Of course that's not Disraeli's comment. I figured you'd just know that. You didn't? There is more than one version, and possibly more than one is accurate, but in the form I've seen most, Benjamine Disraeli is said to have remarked to a friend after her death that ``She was an admirable creature, but she never knew who came first, the Greeks or the Romans.''

ACID
AirCraft IDentification.

acid
A proton donor or, in the Lewis definition, an electron-pair acceptor. Details of the etymology at the acetic acid entry.

In general, acids taste sour. Indeed, European languages typically use the same word for the chemical and gustatory properties. One can translate the first sentence of this paragraph into Spanish as: En general, los ácidos tienen gusto ácido. It detracts a bit from the impressiveness of the insight. Ditto German: Im allgemein, die Säuren schmecken sauer.

But getting back to the point (and ``sharp'' taste is often sourness), the sour taste sense detects chemical acidity, but there is no equivalent taste sense for basicity. Just so you can calibrate your mouth, the pH of lemons is around 2.2, and vinegar is around 2.9. Acid taste is not a perfect measure of acidity, however. For example, apples and grapefruit have comparable acidity (3 to 3.3). Apples taste much less sour because another important factor in determining sour taste is sugar: sweetness masks acidity.

Moreover, if your sausage-and-plantain tastes too sickly sweet, a dash of hot sauce will fix the problem.

ACIDS
American College of Integrated Delivery Systems. Be careful you don't spill that.

ACIL
American Council of Independent Laboratories. That's what it formerly stood for. They've moved beyond their expansion, and that is now in the category of etymology. I hate that. Most other people don't accept it too well either; they want an organization's name to tell them something about it. Of course, they also don't want an organization's name to change. The only solution if you have a meaningful name is to never change what you do (spin off subsidiaries, if necessary). Another alternative is to use a meaningless name in the first place.

ACILS
American Center for International Labor Solidarity. See IRI for the low-down.

ACIP
Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

ACIPR
Adjacent Channel Interface Power Ratio.

ACIS
American Conference for I-wish Studies. Oops, sorry -- Fudd on the brain again. That's Irish Studies. Or, as most natives would hardly know how to say, An Chomhdháil Mheiriceánach do Léann na hÉireann. It's
``a multidisciplinary scholarly organization with approximately 1500 members in the United States, Ireland, Canada and other countries around the world.

Each spring the ACIS holds a national conference attended by 300-400 people from the academic community and the general public. Each fall, meetings are held in the New England, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and Western regions; the Southern regional takes place in the winter. [You know, these guys have something on the ball!] The ACIS also sponsors joint sessions with the American Historical Association [What? The Irish have something to do with US history?] and the Modern Language Association at their annual conventions. Both national and regional meetings include plenary speakers, academic sessions in all fields of Irish Studies, poetry and fiction readings, films and performances of Irish music or plays. In recent years the ACIS has met in Boston, Madison, Omaha, and Philadelphia, as well as Dublin, Galway, Belfast and Limerick. ...''

Active little group, aren't they!

``The ACIS was founded in 1960 as the American Committee for Irish Studies [an interesting coincidence]; it is incorporated in the Commonwealth of Virginia as a non-profit organization.''

I'm not sure if ACIS is a singular ``conference'' because it originally had only one (almost) annual meeting (the 38th, in Limerick, was not until 2000) or if it's singular in the same way that the United Synagogue (see USCJ) or the Roman Catholic Church is singular.

ACJ
Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes. Spanish, `Christian Association of Youths.' The official name and corresponding initialism of the YMCA in Latin America. However, the YMCA logo is used there, and pronounced as a Spanish acronym. That sounds approximately like ``EEM-kah'' in English.

ack
Interjection expressing distress.

ack, ACK
ACKnowledge. ASCII 06, (CTRL-F), Acknowledgments.

A mass-ack is a mass acknowledgment, typically a newsgroup posting in acknowledgment of the receipt of many emails or email votes.

ack-ack
Slang expansion of Anti-Aircraft fire or Antiaircraft Arms (AA). I thought it was an onomatopoeia for the sound made by some machine guns, but the dictionary agrees with Mark. As a sop, it concedes that the usage was influenced by ``attack,'' so there's a sense in which the term is imitative.

The Philosophical Lexicon edited by Daniel Dennett offers an uncannily similar meaning in philosophical discourse, based on a completely unrelated etymology (Ackerman eponym).

Ack-Ack
The title of a memoir by General Sir Frederick Pile, G.C.B., D.S.O., M.C., G.O.C.-in-C., Anti-Aircraft Command 1939-45. The book is mostly about ``Britain's defence against air attack during the second world war.''

I read so few books that in order to appear literate, I make a point of discussing extensively in this glossary every book I do read. This one is mentioned at the command entry.

Acknowledgments
Published works often contain a formal expression of the thanks due to people or institutions who have helped make the publication possible.

In articles for technical journals and conference proceedings, a separate paragraph or two is typical, tucked between the end of the text and the beginning of the list of references, with the section heading ``Acknowledgments.'' This is the place to mention people who participated in ``useful discussions'' but who didn't make the cut as coauthors. It is also a good place to thank any private or public agency that funded or facilitated the research. Acknowledgments in papers are usually brief, but a 1997 conference paper by John K. Yoh has two-and-a-half pages of acknowledgments, ending with ``[and thanks] ... especially to our funding agencies (ERDA, NSF) and the American taxpayers.'' Awwww... he remembered! [The quoted paper is ``The Discovery of the b Quark at Fermilab in 1977: The Experiment Coordinator's Story,'' presented at some conference at Fermilab in 1997 (January or March, apparently).]

Serious nonfiction books normally have acknowledgments in the front matter (see also forward), either as part of a preface or as a separate section. (Acknowledgments in some form are actually required, but since jerks and geniuses are exempted, we're off the hook.)

It is not uncommon for the end of a book's acknowledgments to be a sort of ``dis-disclaimer'' (awkward neologism, sorry) or ``reclaimer'' (hackneyed joke, sorry) in which the author accepts responsibility for all errors, despite the involvement of others who might have prevented them. Here's an unusual version of this, in Orrin W. Robinson's Old English and its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages (Stanford University Press, 1992). Its Preface (pp. v-vi) ends thus:

      It hardly needs to be said that I would like to blame the above people for any defects remaining in the book. Unfortunately, I can't. O.W.R.

A somber note also occurs at the end of ``Stuperspace,'' the last article in a special proceedings issue of Physica 15D, pp. 289-293 (1985):

We would like to thank A. Einstein; unfortunately, he's dead.

The preceding examples probably expressed greater regret than was felt. That's better than the alternative situation. Here's how Simon Varey begins the Acknowledgments page of his Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought 7):

In New York City on 1 May 1984, a thief took every one of my notes for an earlier incarnation of this book. I refer him to Tristram Shandy, book 3, chapter 11. Because of him I have written a different book, and probably a better one, but I wish I had not been forced to do so much of the research twice.

(The entire cited chapter is given over to the reading of an extremely thorough and ecumenical anathema.)

Let's have another writer's nightmare: Ernest Hemingway's first wife Hadley once put all his typescripts together with all the carbons in one suitcase. She forgot the suitcase on a train platform; it was stolen and never recovered.

``Acknowledgements'' is a variant spelling. I want to thank other reference sources for setting me straight on this. See also dedications and NORAD.

I just happened to find my copy of a (probably the) biography of Robert L. Vann, and noticed that the scratched-over handwriting inside the front cover is a vague dedication by the author. (``In appreciation for what I am attempting to do. Thanks, Andrew Buni. September 20, 1974.'') I suppose it's possible that this was written at a signing, but the text and the presence of a date suggest otherwise. Also, back in those days university presses didn't engage in much, if any, of that sort of promotion. I figure Buni sent this as a complimentary copy, possibly as a promotion.

Taking Buni's presumed gesture as an acknowledgment of moral support, at least, we might describe it as an intermediate level of acknowledgment: the person to whom the dedication was inscribed is not explicitly acknowledged in the front matter. This raises the question whether persons acknowledged get a complimentary copy. I received one book this way, and I'm not aware of any other book in which I have been acknowledged. With very long acknowledgment lists, however, and with certain kinds of corporate entities, I imagine complimentary copies are rare. It's probably up to the author, and publishers probably balk at too many complimentary copies unless they can be justified as realistically promoting sales.

With textbooks, however, things get a bit twisted. Since professors can ``require'' a book for courses they teach, textbook publishers consider the ``examination copies'' sent free to them a sensible expense. The word ``required'' is enclosed in quotes because many students don't buy (or rent) the texts their professors think they require. University book stores place orders for fewer books than professors ``order'' from them, partly anticipating this and partly to account for competition from off-campus book sources and from nominally inappropriate older editions still in circulation. Problems occur whenever (and that's often) book stores guess wrong as to the number of books that will really be required. Students may want to keep this in mind, and not wait too long to buy books for smaller courses. It is my impression that this is a particular problem for engineering courses, but that might be biased by my limited experience. I hope you read this paragraph carefully. At any time it's liable to be removed to ``examination copy'' or ``university book stores'' or some other entry, and you'll have a hell of a time finding it again.

Other academic publication quirks have to do with doctoral and master's dissertations. These are bound, but hardly published. (Their content does often see publication, however. In science and engineering, the dissertation is often cobbled from short papers the student authored or co-authored for journal publication. In the humanities, a recent graduate's doctoral dissertation typically forms the core of a book that a newly-minted tenure-track professor hopes will lead to tenure. For the extremely unusual instance of a dissertation eventually published over 40 years later, see the case of Frank Bourgin at the ABD entry.) In any event, dissertations are now mostly available in cheap photocopies that University Microfilms will produce from its archives. Most of them have acknowledgment front matter, and the degree candidate -- if not too stupid to earn a degree -- first acknowledges his academic advisor (or occasionally advisors), and then others (especially orals committee members). The university library always, the department if required, the advisor or advisors certainly, and the other members of the committee often get a bound copy of the final version of the dissertation. (The library may require more than one.)

ACL
Access Control List. Used in NTFS for Windows NT.

ACL
ACetal. Polyoxymethylene. Also abbreviated POM. San Diego Plastics, Inc. has a short page of information on Acetal.

ACL
Advanced CMOS Logic. One-micron technology. Also AC. Cf. ACT. This page from TI.

[column]

ACL
American Classical League. Founded in 1919 for the purpose of fostering the study of classical languages in the United States and Canada. An organization mostly for secondary-school Latin and Greek teachers, but membership is open to anyone who (and only to anyone who) would want to join (``committed to the preservation and advancement of our classical inheritance from Greece and Rome'').

Based in Oxford! Oh. Sorry, I mean ``Oxford, OH!'' So is the Campanian Society, come to think of it.

ACL
Anterior Cruciate Ligament.

ACL
Association for Computational Linguistics.

ACLA
American Comparative Literature Association, founded in 1960. A constituent society of the ACLS since 1974. ACLS has an overview.

ACLAM
American College of Laboratory Animal Medicine. In ninth-grade biology, one of our first labs involved shelling a clam.

ACLANT
Allied (i.e. NATO) Command atLANTic.

[column]

AClas
Acta CLASsica. Annual, begun in 1959. Published by A. A. Balkema Publishers. ISSN 0065-1141. Indexed on PCI (not free) and TOCS-IN (free). (Choose.)

ACLJ
American Center for Law and Justice.

In 1990, it ``began its operations in Virginia Beach, Virginia -- where the ACLJ was founded by Dr. Pat Robertson, a Yale Law School graduate [better known, I believe, as a Christian broadcaster]. Over the years, the ACLJ has expanded its work and reach with the creation of the European Centre for Law and Justice, based in Strasbourg, France,'' and ``the Slavic Centre for Law and Justice, based in Moscow, Russia. Today, the ACLJ has a network of attorneys nationwide and its national headquarters is located in Washington, D.C. -- just steps away from the Supreme Court and Congress.''

ACLPS
Academy of Clinical Laboratory Physicians and Scientists.

ACLS
Advanced Cardiac Life Support. A regime including defibrillator and drugs.

ACLS
American Council of Learned Societies.

Thirty-four out of its sixty-one constituent societies have names beginning in the letter A.

ACLU
American Civil Liberties Union. Nat Hentoff, a disenchanted former activist member, says a friend of his now calls them the ``religious left.''

Acm
ACetamidoMethyl.

ACM
Academy of Country Music. A trade association based in Los Angeles.

`` 'cademy'' -- that sounds kinda pointy-headed. Shore would be nass if'n they got togethah witha computin' machin'ry folk fer a joint hoot'n'anny!

In ``The Blues Brothers,'' Elwood (Dan Ackroyd) asks ``What kind of music do you usually have here?'' He receives this immortal reply:

Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western.

Y'know, this is just the sort of attitude that could explain how there has to be a CMA as well. (Interestingly, even though SBF has a full-time banjo expert at the alpha chapter [Buffalo], we only learned about ACM and CMA through a videotaping mishap at our Ontario research facility.)

ACM
Address Complete Message. (ATM, SS7 acronym.)

ACM
Alan Crider Ministries.

ACM
Alliance for Community Media.

ACM
Asbestos-Containing Material. A quick way to make bankruptcy look attractive.

ACM
Association for Computing Machinery. It would be pretty odd if this organization didn't have a homepage.

Whatis?com offers a handy list of their special interest groups (SIG's).

ACM
Atmospheric Corrosion-rate Monitor[s].

ACM
Audio Compression Manager.

ACMI
American College of Medical Informatics.

A.C. Milan
Associazione Calcio MILAN. A very successful soccer club founded in 1899. The founders were Englishmen. Perhaps if they'd been Italians in England it might have been called ``Milano Football Association,'' or ``Milano F.A.'' for short.

ACMLA
Association of Canadian Map Libraries & Archives. It's interesting to compare this with the French name (the expansion of ACACC).

ACMP
American College of Medical Physics. Not an undergraduate-type college, you understand. Publishes the Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics (JACMP). Cf. AAPM.

ACMPE
American College of Medical Practice Executives. Closely affiliated with the MGMA. The ACMPE administers examinations (and requires continuing education credit hours) to certify MPE's (as CMPE's). Publication of one sort or another is required to advance to fellow status (FACMPE).

ACMRS
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. At ASU.

ACMS
Aircraft Condition Monitoring System.

ACMV
L'Association canadienne des médecins vétérinaires. (In English: CVMA.)

ACN
ACetoNitrile. CH3CN. A/k/a methyl cyanide, cyanomethane (37k and 5.6k ghits respectively, as of mid-May 2009, compared to 2.35M ghits for acetonitrile). The systematic name, the name deemed correct by IUPAC, is ethanenitrile (8.4k ghits).

Acetonitrile is a byproduct of acrylonitrile production. Acrylonitrile is also abbreviated ACN.

ACN
ACryloNitrile. CH2CHCN. See previous entry.

ACN
Anglican Communion Network. An incipient secessionist movement still (2005) within the ECUSA. Alternatively, it is a part of the ECUSA that wants to remain within the worldwide Anglican Communion as the ECUSA departs. ``ACN allows Episcopalians to remain in communion with the vast majority of the worldwide Anglican Communion who have declared either impaired or broken communion with the Episcopal Church USA. For many Episcopalians, the ACN has come to represent the hope for a return to the historic faith and order of Anglicanism.'' From the outside, it seems to be all about gay clergy, but they insist it's about other, minor stuff, like belief in God and scripture. Cf. AAC.

ACN
Automated Collision Notification (system).

ACNA
Anglican Church in North America. A conservative denomination formed in 2009 by Anglicans in the US and Canada unhappy with the liberal direction of the Episcopal Church (in the US) and the Anglican Church of Canada.

ACO
L'Association canadienne des optométristes. In English: CAO.

ACO
Automatic Cut-Off.

ACOA
Adult Child[ren] Of Alcoholic[s].

AcOEt
Ethyl (Et) Acetate (Ac). The ester formed from ethanol (CH3CH2OH) and acetic acid (CH3COOH). The O in the abbreviation presumably represents the oxygen between the carboxyl and alcohol carbons.

ACOFP
American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians. ``ACOFP is the national organization of Osteopathic Family Physicians. ... Officially chartered April 4, 1950, in the State of California, the College was affiliated with the AOA in 1953 as the American College of General Practitioners in Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery.''

Acol
Since this is an acronym glossary, the only thing we're allowed to say about the Acol bidding system in bridge is that Acol is not an acronym. Oh, all right.

The following is from a newsgroup posting by Martin Ambuhl:

The Acol system evolved from discussions by Jack Marx and S.J. Simon at the Acol Bridge Club in Acol Road in Hampstead. These were fueled by the 1933 Culbertson's America vs. England match. Marx and Simon formed the first Acol Team with Harrison Gray and Iain Macleod in 1935. They completely dominated the previously preeminent teams (Ingram, Beasley, and Lederer), winning everything in sight. The Acol team, augmented by Leslie Dobbs and Kenneth Konstam, won the 1936 Gold Cup. Shortly thereafter Terence Reese joined the Acol group. By the time the Germans invaded Poland, half the tournament players in England had adopted the new methods, including such players as Boris Shapiro, Niel Furse, Nico Gardner (head of the London School of Bridge).

There is an Acol Bridge Club in that part of London today, specifically at 86 West End Lane, West Hampstead, London NW6 2LX. That's at the corner of West End Lane and Compayne Gardens. From there along West End Lane it's about 3 blocks south (counting streetcorners on the left) to Acol Road. Some newsgroup postings claim it's the same club and some claim it isn't. There ought to be some reason why this bridge club is named for a short, somewhat distant side-street. Moreover, as of 2005, the club's homepage has a marquee that scrolls ``The Home of English Bridge for over 60 years!'' It's plausible that the page author wanted a round number, and that ``over 70 years'' wasn't yet appropriate when the page went up. OTOH, FWIW, the club's pages seem nowhere to come out and make the plain assertion that the Acol system was named after the club and not, say, vice versa.

Today Acol in various variants (including one called Stone Age Acol, presumably the closest to what was played in the 1930's) is the dominant bidding system in Britain.

Here's a manageable set of webpages on Acol, served by Bridge Guys (dot com).

ACOL
Analytical Chemistry by Open Learning. A textbook series published by Wiley.

ACOR
American Center of Oriental Research. In Amman, Jordan.

ACOR
Association of Cancer Online Resources.

ACOR
Australian Centre for Oilseed Research.

ACORN
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ``Now'' is a moving target. The organization has been in existence since 1970. It promotes left-wing and progressive causes in the US. In 2003, ACORN had 160,000 dues-paying members. Roughly one activist for every two thousand inactivists. Apparently that's not enough. They hire people for $8 an hour or thereabouts, to go into the community, find eligible citizens, and help them fill out voter-registration cards. The way this promotes left-wing causes is that the communities are poor and presumed to be left-leaning.

A wage of $8 an hour may not buy very good work, and many of the ex-cons they managed to hire didn't follow proper procedure. They helped non-existent and therefore ineligible citizens, named them fancifully or with help from newspapers and TV, and helped these fictitious persons fill out voter-registration cards by, for example, listing their addresses as homeless shelters. They must have been surprised when they were found out, but persons named Tom Tancredo, Dennis Hastert, and Leon Spinks turned out not to be as obscure as they must have supposed, and names like Fruito Boy Crispila not so credible. Just to put some numbers on this: in 2006, ACORN registered 1800 new voters in the state of Washington, and all but 6 of them were fake. According to Fox News, state investigators were told by one worker ``[that] it was a lot of hard work making up all those names'' and another ``said he would sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out the forms.'' I guess that could explain Mr. Fruito Crispila.

ACOST
Advisory Council On Science and Technology (UK). I don't know...pronouncability is not always a virtue. I can think of two alternate ways to apprehend the acronym per se that make this appear an infelicitous choice. Maybe they should have kept it ``Advisory Council of the United Kingdom Government on S&T issues.''

ACP
African, Caribbean, and Pacific. A heterogeneous but apparently useful category for economic-development types. It doesn't include any large country with possessions in or borders on one or more of the constituent regions.

Hey, why not? Here's proof that I didn't make this one up myself. If I had made it up, it would have been more specific, like Angola, Cuba, and Portugal or Purgatory (somewhere in the southern Hemisphere or New Mexico). [Let me clarify that: there's a town of Purgatory in New Mexico. For all I know, it might be a center for laxative production. Also, according to Dante's Divine Comedy, Purgatory is at the antipode to Jerusalem.]

In EC usage, ACP is a set of developing countries signatory to the Lomé convention (1975), a reciprocal trade-and-aid agreement.

ACP
American Center for Physics. ``A building that houses central offices for the American Institute of Physics, The American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.''

The ACP is pleased to have a street address of
One Physics Ellipse,
College Park, MD 20740

ACP
American College of Phlebology. Man, they're putting American schools in all kinds of way-out places.

ACP
American College of Physicians.

ACP
American College of Psychiatrists.

ACP
Animal Care Panel. Founded in 1950, renamed AALAS in 1967.

ACP
Associated Collegiate Press.

The Observer is ``The Independent Student Newspaper Serving Notre Dame and Saint Mary's.'' The issue of Monday, February 25, 2001 had the following front-page story, modestly placed below the fold:

Observer takes top honors at ACP national convention.

The article was written by one of the senior news editors. Here are the first two paragraphs, faithfully transcribed:
The Observer took home its first ever Newspaper of the Year award Sunday from the Associated Collegiate Press (ACP).

``This was the result of many long hours in the office four our staff and is proof that The Observer is continuing it's long legacy of excellence,'' said Noreen Gillespie, managing editor of The Observer.

The story continues on page 4. Half of the World & Nation page (p. 5) is devoted to an AP wire report from London: Foot-and-mouth cases on the rise.

If you didn't read the rest of the paper, you might imagine that the elementary spelling errors and international news sense were jokes, like the full-issue salute to Saint Mary's women that once ran on Labor Day (1996, I think it was).

The Observer won in the ``Four-year [college] Daily [more than once per week]'' category. In addition to first- through third-place winners, there were two honorable mentions (HM's). That sounds like a higher honor.

If you believe what you read in the paper, then here's some further information on the ACP: it ``is a division of the National Scholastic Press Association [NSPA] and is the oldest and largest organization for college student media in the United States. Founded in 1921, the ACP today has nearly 800 members, including close to 600 student newspapers.'' As the ACP page explains, it was the NSPA that was founded in 1921, with some college members; the ACP was founded in 1933.

ACP, l'ACP
L'Association canadienne de philosophie. (Canadian Philosophical Association.)

ACP, l'ACP
L'Association canadienne des paraplégiques. (Canadian Paraplegic Association.)

ACP
Automóvel Clube de Portugal.

ACP
Autoridad del Canal de Panamá. `Panama Canal Authority.' An autonomous agency of the Panamanian government, charged with operating and maintaining the Panama Canal.

ACPA
American Chronic Pain Association.

ACPA
American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association.

ACPA
American College Personnel Association.

ACPA
American Concrete Pipe Association.

ACPA
American Crop Protection Association. Brought to you by farmers, the people who own the 5AM TV timeslot.

ACPAR
Angular Correlation of Positron Annihilation Radiation. Calm down -- all it takes to annihilate a positron is an electron, and you contain about a mole of them per gram (or about 2.73x1026 per pound).

ACPAU
Association canadienne du personnel administratif universitaire. In English: CAUBO.

ACPE
Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education. Formerly the ACPE.

Originally founded (1932) to accredit pre-service education, in 1975 its scope expanded to include accrediting providers of continuing pharmacy education. That's the general direction, isn't it? Professionalization up the wazoo. But the cure probably isn't worse than the disease. In continuing legal education, a lot of the commercially-offered credits are regarded as worthless.

ACPE
American College of Physician Executives.

ACPE
American Council on Pharmaceutical Education. Now the ACPE. The name change took place in 2003, so there's a lot of confusion, with many webpages referring to the ACPE when they mean the ACPE. Some pages mentioin both the ACPE and the ACPE, without giving any indication that they are the same organization. For more about the name change, see the this AJP entry.

ACPI
Advanced Configuration and Power Interface.
``An open industry specification co-developed by Compaq, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix, and Toshiba.

ACPI establishes industry-standard interfaces for OS-directed configuration and power management on laptops, desktops, and servers.

ACPI evolves the existing collection of power management BIOS code, Advanced Power Management (APM) application programming interfaces (APIs), PNPBIOS APIs, Multiprocessor Specification (MPS) tables and so on into a well-defined power management and configuration interface specification.

The specification enables new power management technology to evolve independently in operating systems and hardware while ensuring that they continue to work together.''

Of practical consumer interest:

OSPM provides a new appliance interface to consumers. In particular, it provides for a sleep button that is a ``soft'' button that does not turn the machine physically off but signals the OS to put the machine in a soft off or sleeping state. ACPI defines two types of these ``soft'' buttons: one for putting the machine to sleep and one for putting the machine in soft off.

This gives the OEM two different ways to implement machines: A one-button model or a two-button model. The one-button model has a single button that can be used as a power button or a sleep button as determined by user settings. The two-button model has an easily accessible sleep button and a separate power button. In either model, an override feature that forces the machine off or resets it without OS consent is also needed to deal with various [putatively] rare, but problematic, situations.
(See section 1.5 of the ACPI spec.)

ACPM
American College of Prehospital Medicine. A college in the sense of a degree-granting institution, with a physical location but with courses generally taken on-line. ``If you have been frustrated trying to complete an undergraduate degree and feel you may never be able to do so trying to balance family and career, Internet-based distance education may be the answer. ACPM is 100% dedicated to the needs of military and civilian emergency medical care providers.'' This is the first college I've ever encountered that features PayPal as its principal payment option. Accredited since 1995 by DETC.

ACPM
American College of Preventive Medicine. This ACPM is intended to delay your need for the services of those trained by this ACPM.

ACPO
(UK) Association of Chief Police Officers.

ACPP
Australian College of Pharmacy Practice.

ACPPU
L'Association canadienne des professeures et professeurs d'université. Same as the CAUT.

ACPR
Ariel Center for Policy Research. It was ``established in 1997 as a non-profit, non-partisan organization, committed to stimulating and informing the national and international debates concerning all aspects of security policy - notably those policies which are an outcome of the political process started in Oslo and subsequently called the Peace Process.'' Likud-oriented.

ACPRTS
Association canadienne des professeurs de rédaction technique et scientifique. (`Canadian Association of Teachers of Technical Writing.')

ACPV
American College of Poultry Veterinarians. Chickens, and apparently birds in general, have their lungs near the tops of their bodies. I guess that improves stability, even on the ground.

ACPW
Asymmetrical CoPlanar Waveguide.

acq.
ACQui{ re[s|d] | sition[s] }.

ACQS
American Council for Québec Studies. Apparently based, like ACSUS, at SUNY Plattsburgh, in upstate New York.

acquisition of language
Some people in the field of language education make a distinction between language learning and acquisition. This is clear enough from the following footnote:
Here, we do not distinguish "learn" and "acquire," making no claim as to whether conscious language learning or unconscious language acquisition are involved.
[The quote is footnote 2 of ``Age, Rate and Eventual Attainment in Second Language Acquisition,'' by Stephen D. Krashen, Michael A. Long, and Robin C. Scarcella, in TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Dec. 1979), pp. 573-582. (Krashen is extremely prominent in the field of SLA, and Scarcella is no slouch either.)]

ACR
Abrupt Change in Resistivity. Resulting, say, from electromigration-induced void formation.

ACR
Additive Cell Rate. The rate at which a source can transmit ATM cells after increasing its rate by the RIF.

ACR
Adjusted Community Rating.

ACR
American College of Radiology. Not a post-secondary educational institution, but, well, yes, a post-post-secondary or post-post-post-secondary educational institution, and as such a post-secondary one, but not exactly that, but a professional organization for professionals -- not that undergraduates aren't in some sense professional but anyway you get the idea.

ACR
American College of Rheumatology. ``[T]he professional organization of rheumatologists and associated health professionals who share a dedication to healing, preventing disability, and curing the more than 100 types of arthritis and related disabling and sometimes fatal disorders of the joints, muscles, and bones.'' ``Curing'' is perhaps a bit hopeful; mostly, it's about palliation and pain management.

ACR, L'ACR
L'Association canadienne des radiodiffuseurs. ``Le porte-parole des radiotélédiffuseurs privés du Canada.'' (`The voice of the private broadcasters of Canada.') The organization name in English is CAB. CAB holds its annual convention in October.

ACR
L'Association canadienne des rédacteurs-réviseurs. Editors' Association of Canada.

acre
A nice, sensible unit of area: 43560 square feet. Many countries that have wholeheartedly adopted ``international'' (SI) units find that it is still somewhat more convenient to measure area in old units, because real estate, as such, doesn't wear out very quickly.

An acre is one 640th of a square mile, or 0.40468564224 ha.

ACRE
Active Citizens for Responsible Environmentalism.

ACRES
Australian Centre for Remote Sensing. ``Australia's principal earth resource satellite ground station and data processing facility. ACRES is one in a network of ground stations covering most of the world.'' WWWVL includes a page of remote sensing organizations.

ACRID
The Alberta Chapter of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, Inc. ACRID is affiliated with the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID), based in the US, and with the Association of Visual Language Interpreters of Canada (AVLIC). All I really want to know is whether they pronounce it ``ay-see-rid'' or ``acrid,'' but for some reason these organizations seem to be less than usually interested in the way words sound.

ACRL
Association of College and Research Libraries. A division of the American Library Association (ALA).

ACRONYM
A Contrived Reduction Of Nouns, Yielding Mnemonics.

See also notarikon.

Acronyms are a vast topic and a good jumping-off point for everything, so anything I said about them here would be just a gob in the ocean. So why even hawk up to spit? Nevertheless, I should probably mention somewhere that within this reference work, I tend to favor the word initialism for any acronymic construct whose pronunciation is based entirely or mostly on the names of its component letters.

A demonstration of the importance of having a robust armamentarium of acronyms is adumbrated in this sentence from conservative opinionator Victor Davis Hanson (March 22, 2017, ``Does Europe Treasure NATO Again?''):

We are still waiting to see the fruition of a European External Action Service; so far there are lots of impressive acronyms for various forces and programs, but no brigades in action.

Hey -- well started is half done, no?

across this great land
Among those eligible to vote for me in the next election.

ACROV
American Civic Religion, Official Version. Term introduced by Conor Cruise O'Brien, in his 1996 book on Thos. Jefferson.

ACRS
Accelerated Cost Recovery System. A term used by the US IRS. If you need help preparing your tax return, try visiting the IRS website.

Acrux
Jargon for Alpha Crucis, the star at the ``foot'' of the Southern Cross.

ACRV
Assured Crew Return Vehicle or Astronaut Crew Rescue Vehicle. Because getting there really is only half the fun.

acrylic acid
Propenoic acid. Illustration at the PMMA entry. Here's a gas: acrylic acid has antibiotic action. You can read about it in J. M. Sieburth, ``Acrylic acid, an antibiotic principle in antarctic waters,'' Science, 132, 6767 (1960). And no, it didn't come from a toxic shirt spill, it came from yellow-brown algae. atohaas, a subsidiary of Rohm and Haas that bills itself as ``The Worldwide Leader in Acrylic Technology,'' does not list this among the medical and other applications of acrylics.

Here are instructions on how you can use acrylic to protect yourself.

Du Pont originally began research in acrylic plastics in order to find a use for its surplus isobutanol byproduct. Plexiglass is polyacrylic.

acrylic plastic
Almost certainly poly methyl methacrylic plastic (PMMA).

ACS
Access Control System.

ACS
Ackerman Computer Sciences. ``Designers, Developers and Manufacturers of Intelligent Electronic Components Including CEBus Products and Custom Embedded Controllers.''

ACS
Acrylonitrile Chlorinated polyethylene Styrene (terpolymer).

ACS
Acute Coronary Syndrome.

ACS
Advanced Communication System.

ACS
Advanced Conservative Studies. Something practiced at the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies, according to the eponymous founder.

ACS
American Cancer Society. American Cancer Society NYSERNet site.

ACS
American Ceramic Society. Also ``ACerS.'' Visit here for the Basic Science Program.

ACS
American Chemical Society.

ACS
American College of Surgeons. Founded in 1913, it currently has over 60,000 members and represents all surgical specialties.

ACS
Archives and Collections Society.

ACS
Associated Colleges of the South.

ACS
L'Association canadienne de soccer. Try L'ACS.

ACS
Association of Caribbean States. Cf. OECS.

ACS
Attitude Control System. No, not beer. The attitude here is a plane's angle of attack.

ACS
Australian Computer Society.

ACSAD
Arab Center for the Studies of Arid zones and Dry lands. It's run by the Arab League and located in Deir Ezzor, in northern Syria.

Northern Syria is also the area where reportedly, on September 6, 2007, Israeli planes attacked a facility where North Korean engineers were helping their Syrian friends with some cement they had shipped in from North Korea. Recently modified ship manifests prove that it was cement, but some people wonder why Israel attacked a cement shipment. That's all the sense I can make of the conflicting stories regarding the Korean-flagged ships.

Another version of events has it that Israel attacked military supplies for Hezbollah, but that's ridiculous because (a) under the terms of the 2006 ceasefire, Hezbollah is not to be rearmed, and (b) under the supervision of the UN-hatted international peace-keeping force charged with preventing Hezbollah from rearming, Hezbollah was fully rearmed long before the September attack. In short, no one believes the Hezbollah arms story.

Interestingly, the only countries that have condemned the attack are Syria and North Korea, which have also denied that the planes bombed a military research facility that was storing North Korean nuclear material, shortly after North Korea again finally agreed to abandon its nuclear enrichment program. So if North Korea is not playing a Syrian shell game with its nuclear weapons program, why did the Israelis bomb?

On September 29, Syrian Vice-President Faruq Al Shara showed photos of some damaged building somewhere and explained that the Israeli attack hit ACSAD. The next day, a statement was issued by ACSAD, attacking the Zionist media for claiming that the attack hit ACSAD. The Arab League headquarters in Cairo was unable to confirm that the photos shown by Al Shara were of ACSAD.

Well, here's something curious. In January 2006, the Directors-General of ACSAD and the Arab Atomic Energy Agency signed a memorandum of understanding. I don't know the details, but it had to do with agriculture.

ACSANZ
Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand.

ACSC
Australian Computer Science Conference.

ACSE
Antarctic Coastal and Shelf Ecosystem.

ACSE
Association Control Server Element. (In application layer of ATM.)

ACSET
(Grand Rapids, Michigan) Area Community Service Employment and Training.

ACSL
Advanced Continuous Simulation (programming) Language.

ACSM
American College of Sports Medicine. Founded 1954. See also NASM.

ACSM
American Congress on Surveying and Mapping. Founded in 1941. Member societies:

ACSO
Association des Centres de Santé de l'Ontario. French for `Association of Ontario Health Centres.'

ACSUS
AIDS Cost and Services Utilization Survey. Published in 1993, it was ``a longitudinal study of persons with HIV-related disease. In a combination of personal interviews and abstraction of medical and billing records spanning an 18-month period, information was collected on more than 1,900 HIV-infected adults and adolescents, including approximately 350 women, and on 140 HIV-infected children under 13 years of age.''

ACSUS
Association for Canadian Studies in the United States. Publishes the quarterly ARCS. So that's what they call that white region up there where the state map colorings end!

ACSW
Academy of Certified Social Workers. Other credentials are Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) and Board-Certified Diplomate (BCD) in Clinical Social Work (CSW). See SW entry for related entries. (http://www.acsw.com/ is Academic Software, Inc., which prefers to go by the acronym ASI.)

ACT
Action for Children's Television. Founded by Peggy Charren and two other Boston moms in 1968.

In the 1970's, ACT successfully pushed for legal restrictions on commercialism in children's TV programming, and claimed credit for the prohibition of product promotions by children's-show hosts and other commercial practices. ACT also successfully pushed for a ban (implemented by FCC regulatory action) on vitamin-pill ads, when it was found that children were poisoning themselves with overdoses. (Iron is very dangerous; some vitamins, particularly the oil-soluble ones, can produce some of the same symptoms when taken in great excess as when not available in sufficient quantity.)

ACT's advocacy helped pass the Children's Television Act of 1990, which required the FCC to impose some limits on commercials in children's programming (in 1991 they set these at 10.5 minutes per hour weekends, 12 minutes/hour weekdays) and required commercial stations to report on efforts to provide ``educational and informational'' programming as part of their license renewal applications. Products with direct tie-ins to a children's program are forbidden to be advertised during the program (so, for example, GI Joe dolls can't be advertised during the GI Joe show), though they can be advertised at any other time, such as immediately afterwards. You're not the only person who thinks this particular restriction is toothless. There are also restrictions on 900-number ads aimed at children.

ACT president Charren did something surprising in 1992. She decided that with the FCC's new rules, there was no important work for ACT to do that could not be done better by other organizations, particularly local advocacy groups, so she folded it. Remaining assets of $125,000 were donated to Harvard University Graduate School of Education for an annual fellowship and a lecture series on children's TV. ACT was supported over the years by a series of grants -- the first for $165,000 from the John Markle Foundation in 1970, later grants from the Ford and Carnegie foundations. Some saw the end of ACT as simply a reaction to a funding fall-off. The organization had a $500,000/year budget and a staff of 15 in its 70's heyday, and was down to four employees and $125,000/year in 1991.

ACT always opposed censorship, as she saw it, and that's about right if you accept the conventional legal views that (1) commercial speech does not enjoy the full protection that the first amendment grants to noncommercial, press, and individual private speech and (2) that children have special vulnerability that the state has a significant (or ``compelling,'' Supreme Court decisions turn on such distinctions) interest to be balanced against free-speech concerns. In any case, the Federal Communications Act is the most explicitly socialist document in US law, recognizing the frequency spectrum as a limited resource belonging to the people collectively, and hence subject to regulation by the FCC. ACT opposed the boycotts and what Peggy Charren saw as censorship advocated by conservative groups like the Moral Majority, and indicated that their declining influence also allowed her to disband ACT. ACT joined on the plaintiffs' side in a suit by broadcasters against the FCC's ban on indecent broadcasts.

ACT
ACTivity bit. (ATM acronym.)

ACT
Actual Cycle Time.

ACT
Advanced CMOS logic (ACL) using TTL voltage levels.

ACT
(Canadian) Alliance for Children and Television. Sounds like a conflict of interest right there.

ACT
Alternative Control Technique[s].

ACT
America Coming Together. A liberal group founded in 2003. Heavily funded by George Soros and insurance magnate Peter Lewis, it spent tens of millions of dollars in get-out-the-vote drives in 2004. It was originally intended to continue operating as an independent political organization, with the cachet it gained from helping to elect President John F. Kerry giving it influence in the new administration, but things didn't work out that way. It was disbanded in August 2005.

There was a sister organization called the Media Fund, similarly funded and defunded by the same pair. Illinois Representative Rahm Emanuel, the DCCC Chair for the 2006 elections, gave an interview to the New York Daily News in August 2006 in which he transparently criticized Soros and Lewis: ``In the 2004 election there were some very active players who, as far as I can tell, have now decided they're neither going to be involved in the field, advertising or anything. ... Do you know where they are?'' Some commentators commentated that dissing some of the party's most generous contributors might not be wise.

ACT
American College of Theriogenologists. From an About-ACT page: ``To develop a name for the College, Professor Herbert Howe, Department of Classics, University of Wisconsin was consulted. After much consideration Theriogenology was chosen; therio(=beast or animal) + gen/genesis (=beginning, birth, reproduction)+ology (=study of).''

During WWI, my grandfather was an officer in the Kaiser's army, on the western front. As an officer, he rode a horse, of course. On some occasion, with most of the details lost to history, a farmer went away and left him with a mare that was about to drop a foal. The farmer must have supposed that as an officer and a horse rider, he knew his way around a horse. Maybe my grandfather should have pointed out that in civilian life, he was a lawyer (actually a Rechtsanwalt, which is perhaps better translated as `barrister,' but in any case a city-slicker lacking the relevant hands-on experience). In the event, the mare had a difficult birth, which my grandfather didn't realize until too late, and the foal died.

ACT
American College Test. A competitor of the SAT test. The organization that administers the test now styles itself ACT -- Information for Life's Transitions, and insists that it was only ``formerly American College Testing.'' (For a similar example see the SPIE. I mean, International Business Machines is now officially just IBM, but they don't make a big fuss about it, and you can even find the expansion that led to the name on their web pages.) What tendentious nonsense. (For your inconvenience, we serve at least one other certifiably tendentious link.)

Apart from the general organization website linked above, ACT has a short-words-and-simple-sentences ``student site for ACT test takers.'' Cartoons and photographs are ``diverse'' or ``balanced.'' (I.e., if there are fewer than ten student models in a page view, then any white male must be able to pass for Hispanic. The color-calibrated society. I'm sure that the people involved in these travesties don't suspect they are pandering, disingenuous, or sneakily offensive. Where are the redheads!? Why aren't there any redheads?! They didn't include redheads! We're being objectified! Oppression! Oppression!)

The ACT must be one of the most superfluous of college entrance exams. Competitive schools rely on the SAT.

ACT
American Conservatory Theater. In San Francisco.

ACT
Australian Capital Territory. This contains the national capital Canberra, and is completely surrounded by the state of New South Wales. In 1915, the Commonwealth government purchased the Jervis Bay Territory from the state of New South Wales, so that Canberra would have access to the sea. This is great; now all that Canberra needs is access to the Jervis Bay Territory. Jervis Bay Territory is still a separate, federally administered territory, but for practical purposes (no, I'm not sure how practical) it is part of the ACT, and I've seen it called the Jervis Bay Exclave of the Australian Capital Territory.

Jervis is a name like Berkeley. In both cases, the eponym (British admiral John Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent; Bishop George Berkeley) has a first-syllable er that was pronounced like the word are, and in both cases the toponym (Jervis Bay, Australia; Berkeley, California) has regularized the sound to er.

ACTA
American Council of (College and University) Trustees and Alumni. It's very common for alumni to become trustees, but... it still strikes me as a somewhat unbalanced pairing... perhaps because I don't know much about the organization.

Acta Diurna
Tijdschrift voor Latinisten en aanverwanten. A Dutch classics journal. I'll get back to this entry when their website is finished. Okay, okay: I mean I'll get back to it when the website has an English version.

ACTC
Association canadienne de télévision par câble. English CCTA.

ACTD
Advanced-Concept Technology Demonstration.

Actel
An FPGA designer and developer (they subcontract manufacture to a number of foundries). As of 1995, Actel and Xilinx dominated FPGA world market.

ACTF
American College Theatre Festival. That's officially the KC/ACTF.

ACTFL
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Its five regional affiliates are SCOLT, SWCOLT, CSC, NECTFL, and PNCFL.

See also NADSFL, NCSSFL.

ACTG
AIDS Clinical Trials Group.

ACTH
AdrenoCorticoTropic Hormone. Also called corticotropin, but I guess that didn't lend itself to a very distinctive initialism. ACTH stimulates the secretory activity of the adrenal glands. ACTH in its turn is produced by the anterior pituitary, which is stimulated to release it by the aptly named CRH.

ACTH levels in the blood vary over the course of the day. The normal range is up to 80 pg/ml at 8-10 AM, unless you keep weird hours like me. (Yeah, the units there are picograms per milliliter. When you're talking hormones, a little bit goes a long way.)

ACT II
Advanced Concepts and Technology II. A military procurement program.

activated
Depending exponentially on 1/T. That is, varying as
exp( -Eact / kBT ) ,
where kB is Boltzmann's constant, T is absolute temperature, and Eact is called an activation energy, and lies approximately in the range of 0.1 to 10 eV for phenomena that exhibit activation at room temperature. Activated behavior is commonly observed in transport and reaction coefficients for phonon-assisted processes (e.g., atomic and ionic diffusivity, electron and hole mobility in materials with strong electron-phonon coupling that leads to localized carriers, carrier density and conductivity in intrinsic semiconductors).

Activated temperature dependence is also called Arrhenius behavior. See more at the Arrhenius plot entry.

activated sludge
Sludge that is well oxygenated and rich in destructive microorganisms that will produce what is charmingly known as ``high-quality effluent.''

activator
In the field of adhesives and sealants (A&S), an activator is a chemical applied to bonding surfaces to prepare them for bonding.

active filter
A filter circuit which includes electronic components that are active, in the electronic device sense (transistors, op amps, maybe some more exotic devices). Any filter that is not a passive filter.

Of course, any digital filter is active, but the term active filter tends to imply an analog filter.

active learning
A buzzword popular among educrats and their ilk. The term is associated with the idea that lectures are dry and don't engage students. ``Active learning'' is the putative alternative.

active sludge
Sounds a little too energetic to me. Well aerated sewage rich in destructive bacteria, protozoa, etc., that will rapidly break down the fresh sewage into, like, the opposite. Active sludge is a less common synonym of activated sludge.

active words
Most students of a foreign language are aware of a grammatical distinction in the category of ``voice.'' Declarative sentences may be in the active voice or the passive voice. A typical sentence in the active voice would be
Fat Bob used the elevator.

I want to take a moment here to apologize to readers who are radially challenged, or whatever the current euphemism is. When the sentence is cast into the passive voice, it becomes

The elevator was used by Fat Bob.

Now in both Fat-Bob sentences above, Fat Bob is the ``agent'' of the action performed by the verb. He performs the action, even though the action may not seem like much of a performance. It's true that the elevator does the heavy lifting, but the verb is not ``lift.'' The verb is use, and it is Bob who does the using, so Bob is the agent.

Sorry to break off like this, but the entry is under construction. Fat Bob is the ``subject'' or ``agent'' of the sentence. He performs the action, even though it's not much of a performance

activism
``As soon as I stopped eating meat, I made sure everyone knew that I'd done so, and was, therefore, morally superior. Letting everyone know you're morally superior is called activism.''

Cribbed from Brian Sack: In the Event of My Untimely Demise (HarperOne, 2008), near the bottom of p. 96.

activity
The extensive rate of nuclear decay. That is, the number of decays per unit time. The SI unit of activity is the becquerel (abbreviated Bq), defined as one decay per second.

activity
The ratio of the fugacity of a substance in solution to its fugacity in the liquid state.

The law of mass action in its simplest form expresses equilibrium in terms of concentrations or partial pressures. This is a kind ideal-gas approximation; the correct formulation replaces concentrations with fugacities. (This doesn't instantly solve the problem, of course, since one has the problem of determining the fugacity function.)

activity coefficient
The ratio of the fugacity to whatever is the usual measure of concentration (partial pressure of a gas, mole fraction of a liquid, molar or molal concentration in a solution) used in the law of mass action. Activity coefficients (written as gammas with subscripts indicating chemical component) are factored into the law of mass action for a more realistic description (see preceding activity entry).

ACTLU
ACTivate Logical Unit. (SNA.) That doesn't mean activate the unit that logic would suggest activating. The term ``logical'' is in contradistinction to ``physical,'' and refers to alternate ways of designating devices. Logical names or addresses are assignable, they're handles; physical names are essentially dictated by hardware.

Does sound vaguely reminiscent of Lovecraft's Cthulu, doesn't it? Not even a little bit?

Act of God
Earthquake, famine, flood, pestilence... Is that what He's been doing lately?

ACTPU
ACTivate Physical Unit. (SNA.) Cf. preceding entry (ACTLU).

ACTR
American Council of Teachers of Russian. ``to advance research, training, and the materials development in the fields of Russian and English languages, as well as strengthen communication between the communities of scholars and educators in language, literature, and area studies in the United States and the former Soviet Union.'' Whatever. Founded in 1974, it spawned ACCELS in 1987, and ACTR and ACCELS were folded into a new organization in 1998.

ACTR/ACCELS
Just look up ACTR and ACCELS, willya?

AC Transit
Alameda County (CA) TRANSIT. Buses.

ACTS
Advanced Communications Technologies and Services. An R&D program for developing telecommunications. Established by the 4th Framework Programme of the European Union.

ACTS
Advanced Communications Technology Satellite.

ACTS
Association canadienne des télécommunications sans fil. English CWTA.

[phone icon]

ACTS
Automatic Coin Telephone Service. Related acronym is COCOT.

ACT-UP, Act-Up
AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. Known in its early days for desperate outrageousness.

[column]

actus
A Roman unit of length equal to about 36 meters, or about 118 (Eng.) feet.

ACTWU
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers' Union.

ACT11
Advanced CMOS logic using TTL voltage levels, and having center ground and power pins. Cf. AC11.

ACU
American Christian University. Oh God what a slow-loading homepage.

Update January 2005: obviously thanks to God, the page loads much faster now. Thank you for your prayers -- they were obviously effective.

ACU
American Conservative Union. The oldest conservative lobbying organization in the US: founded in 1964, the year of Barry Goldwater's landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson.

ACU
Antenna Control Unit.

ACUC
Animal Care and Use Committee.

The January 1987 issue of Laboratory Animal Science was a special issue on ``Effective Animal Care and Use Committees.'' Thumbing through it to titillate my uh, to satisfy my curios..., uh, to investigate research into animal pain, I found a couple of titles that whispered heresy! Richard J. Traystman, Ph.D., asked ``ACUC, Who Needs It?: The Investigator's Viewpoint'' (pp. 108-110), while Joseph R. Geraci, V.M.D., Ph.D. and Dean H. Percy (no picture) asked ``Are Animal Care and Use Committees Really Needed?'' (pp. 111-112).

Let me give you a hint about reading scientific papers besides ``don't'': after the title, read the concluding paragraph. The introduction is just a build-up to demonstrate that the topic is more serious, important and interesting than it seems, despite being one of 300,000 published that week. Also, if the article is reviewed, it is good to cite the previous important and excellent work of anyone who may be referee for the article. Asphyxiating as I bated my breath, I cut to the chase.

Geraci and Percy's concluding paragraph begins ``In answer to our original question, ACUCs really are needed.'' Let me take a moment here to point out that the only justification for the use of italics in a scientific paper is to distinguish vectors from scalars.

Breathing more easily now, I notice that the next sentence contains some meaningful information: ``While to some observers their functions may appear to be mundane and unimportant, active ACUCs ...'' I commend the syntactical virtues of this admission to your attentive attention. Recognize that writing, like any game, has both offensive and defensive maneuvers. In the first place, defensive writing requires that one not write anything one would regret having quoted back to one. Crafting effective defensive prose requires one to anticipate the offensive maneuvers of the opponent or ``quoter.'' The ``quoter'' pares away words, like a sculptor chipping away excess material, ultimately leaving a work of art. Thus, any sufficiently long piece of prose can be edited to something like ``... I ... like ... [young boys] ....'' The rules of the game more or less require the ellipses and brackets, so the ``quoter'' prefers to be able to use big slabs of text without square-bracket interpolations. Returning, then, to the defensive task at hand, remember: Conjugation is your friend. That is, if a predatory quoter wants to twist your prose into a demonstration that you believe a proposition that you have merely stated as a straw man, inconvenient syntax protects you. In this instance, for example, the text might have read ``Some observers think that the functions of ACUCs are mundane and unimportant, but ....'' Such phrasing is vulnerable to editing into ``ACUCs are mundane and unimportant.'' As defensively organized, however, the verb is appear, and the copula is in infinitive form, so predatory quoters are forced to use more evident modification.

The English language draws its strength from active verbs. How much better ``Dick ran'' than ``Dick was in the process of running''! Hence, if the authors had been writing with no other purpose in mind than to produce clear, taut prose, the ``to be'' in the sentence should have been discarded: ``... functions may appear mundane and unimportant...'' There is no sanction in defensive wording for not compressing the sentence in this way, but flabby writing is a hard habit to break.

According to Traystman's concluding paragraph: ``The answer of course is, all of us need it!!'' You know, some authors of papers in scientific journals seem not to be aware of it, but the use of exclamation marks for emphasis WILL NOT BE TOLERATED!!!!!!!!! The only reason for exclamation marks is to indicate factorial and double factorial. If t is a positive integer,

t! = t * (t-1) * (t-2) * ... * 3 * 2 * 1

t!! = t * (t-2) * (t-4) * ... * (4 or 3) * (2 or 1).

For more on lab animals, see the AWA entry.

ACUS
(US) Army Common User System. A communications system.

acute
Sharp.

In medical usage, the sense of acute is sharply restricted. It refers to health effects that are sharply restricted in time -- of sudden or rapid onset and brief duration. If you imagine a graph of pain or some other measure of morbidity plotted as a function of time, then a sudden onset with rapid decrease immediately after will look like a ``sharp'' spike, so the term is etymologically reasonable in more than just a loosely transferred sense.

On the other hand, use of the term ``acute'' does imply some level of severity: if the pain is not very intense, or the symptom not severe, then the spike will not be very high, and would look not sharp but stubby.

There are a lot of interesting mathematical things one could say about the maximum, topology, coarse-graining, natural scales and dimensional analysis, but physicians rarely think about these wonderful things. Suffice it to say that it is reasonable from the perspective of a scientist's use of language that ``acute'' should mean of rapid onset and short duration, given that the thing described exceeds some threshold level of noticeability. Most decisively, however, the usage is an established convention.

Note that there is no special term implying brief duration without sudden onset. The reason is tautology: if the onset is not rapid, then the duration can't be brief.

Acute is contrasted with chronic.

ACUTE
Accountants Computer Users Technical Exchange. So sophisticated it doesn't need a website, I guess. The expansion given here uses the most commonly encountered inflection of the first word, although it doesn't make sense. Accounting and Accountants', which make more sense, are less common. The thing exchanged is information; ACUTE organizes seminars. They had annual meetings at least as far back as the mid-1980's. I think this organization may have gone out of operation in the mid-nineties.

ACV
Advanced Cargo Vehicle. Old NASA acronym.

A.C.V., ACV
Allegheny Clarion Valley. I must have been in Clarion (I-80 Pennsylvania exits 62 and 64) at least a dozen times in the past dozen years (to 2008), and at least a time or two in Emlenton (exit 42). In Clarion I managed never to encounter this abbreviation. In Emlenton it's everywhere. The reason seems to be that Clarion is not in the Allegheny Clarion Valley.

There are three Clarions in Pennsylvania: Clarion County, and Clarion Township and Clarion Borough, which are in the county. Clarion Borough is almost completely surrounded by Clarion Township, though the borough shares perhaps 150 meters of border with Highland Township. The borough of Clarion is the county seat of Clarion County.

Emlenton Borough straddles the border of Clarion and Venango counties. Children of that borough and some other villages and unincorporated areas attend public schools of the Allegheny Clarion Valley School District. This school district has the unique distinction of being the only school district in Pennsylvania to span parts of four counties (Armstrong, Butler, Clarion and Venango). The ACVSD seems to be the only official government entity to bear the ACV moniker; I would guess that the region was named after the school district.

ACVA
American College of Veterinary Anesthesiologists.

ACVA
American Council for Voluntary Agencies in Foreign Service. Merged with PAID in 1984 to form InterAction. I guess you could say that InterAction put PAID to the ACVA. (I sincerely apologize.)

A-C Valley
Allegheny Clarion Valley, more often A.C.V.

ACVCP
American College of Veterinary Clinical Pharmacology.

ACVD
Acute (ac) CardioVascular Disease. Vide gravy and coup de grâce.

ACVIM
American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine.

ACVM
American College of Veterinary Microbiologists.

ACVO
American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists. For more like this, try the Dog Fanciers' Acronym List.

ACVP
American College of Veterinary Pathologists. It's ``an international organization for those specializing in veterinary and comparative pathology.'' The ACVP and ASVCP hold a joint annual meeting.

ACVPM
American College of Veterinary Preventive Medicine.

ACVR
American College of Veterinary Radiology.

ACVS
American College of Veterinary Surgeons.

ACVSD
Allegheny Clarion Valley School District. See ACV.

acyl
A radical derived from a carboxylic acid by the removal of the hydroxyl group from a carboxyl group:
                        R
                         \
                          \
acid:                      C == O
                          /
                         /
                       HO


                        R
                         \
                          \
acyl:                      C == O
                          /
                         /

For the specific case of R a methyl group, the acyl is acetyl.

acyclovir
ACYCLOguanosine. A drug, used against herpes, that inhibits expression of VIRal DNA.

AC11
Advanced CMOS logic with center ground and power pins. Cf. ACT11.

AC-3
Audio Code #3. Designation during development of a Dolby code that became Dolby Digital. It has five channels: center, left, and right, and rear/surround left and right. There's a subwoofer separated off the rear channels, so it is also sometimes called a 5.1 (channel) system.

ad
ADvertisement. Look, all three major Scrabble dictionaries accept even admass. A fortiori, they must accept ad (and its plural ads).

Challenge!

Okay, okay: mere logic can't guarantee that a word is valid, but in this case the ``reasoning trick'' happens to work.

AD
Aggregate Demand. A macroeconomic fiction.

AD
Agriculture Dept. That is, the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

AD
Air Defense.

AD
Alzheimer's Disease. Related entries: Alzheimer's Association (AA), ApoE4, NSAID, PHF.

Old name: Presenile dementia.

AD
American Demographics Magazine. This indie mag publishes some of the most intriguing research anywhere in the Geisteswissenschaften (vide War of the Words). For example, research reported there found that roach spray sells especially well among lower-class southern women because killing roaches represents a symbolic fantasy fulfillment for these consumers: they tend to regard roaches as very similar to their husbands. There was differential analysis to determine whether the larger size of the roaches was correlated, but...

Other research found that many overweight men deliberately buy shirts that are too tight because they want to emphasize their protuberant bellies.

.ad
(Domain name code for) Andorra.

Rec.Travel offers some links. The CIA Factbook has some basic information on Andorra.

A.D., AD
Anno Domini. Lat.: `(in the) year of (the) Lord.' There is a widespread incorrect belief that AD stands for ``After [Jesus's corporeal] Death.'' This would require three dating eras: Before, During, and After. As it happens, dating in more than three eras that include A.D. has been tried (see explanation at B.C. entry). Cf. CE.

One of the clever turns of phrase in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was returning to the archaic form ``Year of our Lord,'' and naming years as ``Year of our [Henry] Ford.'' (I've seen AF used to represent this dating scheme, though I don't think it occurs in the book. Since it seems reasonable to treat Ford as a gens, the Latin nominative would probably be Fordius, yielding Anno Fordii.) The book begins in 632 AF, or 2540 AD, making 1909 of our era -- the year the Model T was introduced -- year one of the Fordian. The book was published in 1932. Perhaps the 632 date was selected to suggest an uneasy proximity in time. There may be something similar in the other classic dystopian story of the mid-twentieth century, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book was finished in nineteen forty-eight. (It was published in 1949, and Orwell himself was finished in 1950.)

Another expression, more common in Britain, was ``Year of our Grace.''

English is unusual, among European languages, in using a foreign-language expression to designate dates in the current era. It seems that most other languages now use a native expression for A.D. (as well as B.C.).

There is a sketchy introduction to Latin declensions in the A.M. entry that explains why, if you tried to find anno and domini in a Latin dictionary, the closest you'd probably come would be "annus, -i, m." and "dominus, -i, m."

If you wanted to be pretentious, you could read off ``A.D. 2000'' as ``Anno Domini 2000.' If you did that, however, you'd want to be consistently grammatical and use the plural for ``A.D. 2000-2004'': ``Annis Domini 2000-2004.'' If you have to look it up, you're probably safer saying ``ay dee 2000....''

The words century and decade were once used like dozen -- to refer to a number (100 and 10, like 12) of anything, but eventually the use became restricted to years. Hence, if we were to decline A.D. properly in ``1st century A.D.,'' it would be Annorum Domini -- `[century] of years of the Lord.' Here annorum is annum in the plural genitive form.

[column] Even in Late Roman times, this abbreviation, and mode of reckoning dates, was not used. The ASGLE serves two kinds of lists of epigraphic latin abbreviations, which include both common and at-all reported (in APh 1888-1993) meanings for AD.

AD
Analog Devices semiconductor device prefix. They used to serve a nice glossary.

AD, A/D
Analog-Digital. ADC is analog-to-digitial converter.

AD
Application Development.

AD
Arbeitsgemeinschaft Druckbehälter. German: `Pressure measurement Working Group.'

A.D.
Assembly District. Most US states have bicameral legislatures, and the lower or larger house is often called the Assembly.

AD
Assistant Director. In movie and TV-show production, this turns out to be a productive suffix. In fact, for clarity AD is often rendered as 1AD (for first assistant director), distinguished from the 2AD, 3AD, and 22AD. (22 = 3 mod show biz -- no wonder they have huge cost overruns! -- see the second second entry for details. Let me be clearer about that: I mean the first and only second second entry. Ummm, just follow the link.) Some productions have a 4AD. That hat may alternatively be labeled AAD (additional AD) or Key PA (key production assistant).

The novel The Second Assistant, by Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare, was published in 2004, and it is subtitled A Tale from the Bottom of the Hollywood Ladder. I decided to acquire the book for insights into the assistant-director pecking order of Hollywood, and to assure an adequately long and discursive AD section of the glossary. It was only after I had invested fifty cents in a previously read exemplar that I realized that the eponymous second assistant -- the heroine Elizabeth Miller -- was not any order of assistant director, but just a gofer at a talent agency. At least it saved me reading the book. (Skimming, however, I notice that at least one ``third assistant'' is mentioned.)

AD
Athletic Director. A good athletic director lets the university president think that he (the president) is more important.

Look -- any doofus can come up with a weak pun involving athletic directors and athletic supporters. I'm just not any doofus, so I'm just not gonna.

ad, a.d.
Auris Dextra. Lat., `right ear.' Not the right one as opposed to the wrong one. The right one as opposed to the left one. That is, the one on the right side of your or anyone else's head. A good operational method for determining which is the right ear is to measure the distance between any given point on (preferably the outer surface of) the right shoulder and each ear. The shorter distance corresponds to the right ear. This method breaks down for owls, giraffes, and other neck contortionists, and for people without shoulders (or ears, though then it hardly matters). If you're having difficulty with these instructions, you probably need to have your head examined by a professional.

This stuff is more amusing to write than to read, I imagine, since if you're not in the mood you don't write it, but you could come upon the entry any time while reading, and the probability that you'll be in the right mood to read it then is zero. (That's not exactly zero. It's just ``more or less'' zero, except that it shouldn't be negative.) An earlier version of this entry advocated an operational definition involving a mirror, but since your own right ear is reflected as the left ear of your image, the wording was problematical.

These puppies usually come in pairs. The other one is a.s.

An alternative possible (well, conceivable anyway) translation of the Latin would be `fortunate ear.'

ADA
Academy of Dispensing Audiologists. Sounds like PEZ for the ear.

``The Academy of Dispensing Audiologists®, founded in 1976, provides valuable resources to the private practitioner in audiology and to other audiology professionals who have responsibility for the concerns of quality patient care and business operation.''

A heavily laden sentence like this is a sort of anagram that has to be unpacked: A ``quality patient'' does indeed provide ``valuable resources'' to the ``business operation,'' but you have to be a ``private practitioner'' to really tap into that cash.

ADA
Air-Defense Artillery.

ADA
American Dental Association.

ADA
American Diabetes Association. The main diabetes entry in this glossary is DM.

ADA
American Dietetic Association. The US ICDA member.

ADA
American Disability Association. Their three-point mission includes this somewhat disabled language: ``promote awareness of disability culture'' and ``enhance ... access to freedom.'' There is also a nice little demonstration of the atmospheric approach to adjectives, in which the adjective du jour is salted over any noun it might fit. Hence, a diverse diversity of diverse things are diversely described as ``diverse'': disabilities, a perspective, and employment opportunities.

ADA
Americans for Democratic Action. Organization formed in January 1947 at the Willard Hotel by Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Reuther, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. This ADA played a pivotal role in the struggle to purge communist sympathizers from the Democratic party, and helped to defeat Henry Wallace's independent candidacy for the presidency in 1948.

ADA
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

ADA
Assistant District Attorney (DA).

ADA
Authorised Depository Agent.

ADA
Australian Dental Association.

Ada
Automatic Data Acquisitions. The putative acronym justification for naming a programming language after the Countess Ada Lovelace, a mathematician who became a supporter and explicator (``apologist,'' in the nonprejudicial sense) of Babbage's Analytical Engine.

Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852) is quite a feminist heroine, so it's not always safe for a person (as opposed to a relatively anonymous glossarist) to point out that there is some serious question as to whether her mathematical competence was all it is now cracked up to be.

The HBAP (Home of the Brave Ada Programmers) WWW Server has a pretty complete set of links. Unfortunately, they're only useful if you want to use Ada or coerce someone else to use it. And here's an Ada Clearinghouse. It boggles the mind. Okay, some minds.

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes source code for four Ada programs and identifies ALGOL and Simula as similar languages. If you just came here from the ALGOL entry, you shouldn't find that surprising. Now Simula, that almost sounds like a sexy language. Is there a Stimula? No? Why not?

ADAA
Alberta Dental Assistants Association.

ADAA
American Dental Assistants Association.

ADAA
Anxiety Disorders Association of America. Is this partisan, or do they have an outreach program for Republicans?

ADAAF
American Dental Assistants Association Foundation. ``The Foundation is committed to enhancing the profession of dental assisting [thanks for the correction; I'd have thought it was called assistance], promoting education and research relevant to the industry and complimenting [oh, thank you again, I'm sure!] the efforts of the American Dental Assistants Association. The Foundation was established in 1992 by the Board of Trustees of the American Dental Assistants Association to augment the status of the dental assisting profession and further efforts for education and research related to the pursuit.''

ADAAM
Air-Directed Air-to-Air Missile.

ADA&C
Alberta Dental Association and College.

adagio
Italian for `at ease.' A common notation in sheet music, understood as `in a slow tempo' or `slow and graceful': slower than andante but faster than larghetto.

adagio
Spanish for `adage.'

ADAMS
Agencywide Documents Access and Management System.

ADAP
Airport Development Aid Program. US government program. Read about it in an item from 1976.

[column]

ADAP
Archaeological Data Archive Project.

(Also, Tumay Asena serves a Searchable database of archaeological publications.)

Adaptec
A data communications hw and sw company. See their homepage.

ADB
Asian Development Bank. Established in 1968 as part of a regional-development banking system sponsored by the UN. Headquartered in Manila, serving over fifty members, including the Central Asian states that used to be soviet republics. Japan and the US are the largest contributors of funds to the ADB, each responsible for providing a 16% share of the prescribed $23 billion capital. There's also an ADBI.

Fighting Poverty in Asia and the Pacific!

Between 1968 and 1999, Pakistan received loans worth $1.75 billion, making it the second-largest beneficiary of the bank's operations. About 55% of the loans came from the ADF. As soon as I find out which is the largest beneficiary of the bank, or whether any of the loans have ever been repaid, I'll be sure to insert that information.

ADB
Australian Dictionary of Biography.

ADBF
ADaptive BeamForming.

ADBI
Asian Development Bank Institute. ``Asian Development Bank Institute was established in December 1997 in Tokyo through the joint efforts of the ADB and the Government of Japan.''

ADC
Access Deficit Contribution[s]. According to A paper on universal telecommunications service in Europe (a so-called continent):
``The view in the United Kingdom is that British Telecom incurs additional costs by its licence obligation to provide universal service. OFTEL, its primary regulator, has accepted this and requires some of its competitors to pay Access Deficit Contributions.''

ADC
AIDS Dementia Complex.

ADC
Allyl Diglycol Carbonate. A plastic.

ADC
Amperes DC. Term parallel to AAC and VDC.

ADC
Analog-to-Digital (AD) Converter.

ADC
Automatic Data { Collection | Capture }.

ADCA
Automatic Data Collection Association.

ADCB
Asymmetric Double Cantilever Beam.

ADCC
Antibody-Dependent Cell-mediated Cytotoxicity.

ADCCP
Advanced Data Communication Control Protocol. One of the high-level data link control (HDLC) family of protocols. I've seen the P expanded ``Procedures.''

ADCIS
Association for the Development of Computer-Based Instruction.

adcom
ADministrative COMmittee.

adcom
ADmissions COMmittee. This is the committee that admits responsibility after a disaster. It evidently has no connection with the adcom, which takes credit before the disaster.

Hmmm. That makes sense and all, but it's been suggested to me that the word admissions refers to students, somehow.

ADCP
Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler.

AD&D
Accidental Death & Dismemberment. A kind of insurance coverage.

ADD
Analog-Digital-Digital. Audio CD's may be designated AAD, ADD, or DDD. The successive letters indicate whether analog or digital equipment was used in the respective stages of production: (1) original recording, (2) mixing and editing, (3) mastering (transcription).

ADD
Apostrophe Deficit Disorder. People with ADD aren't willing to add an apostrophe to arent. They can't write can't or don't write don't, but don't some of them write cant! And they won't write won't, but are wont to write wont. The disorder can afflict anyone's writin' and ever'one's readin', whether they're ignorant of the proper use of apostrophes or not. (In the latter case, ADD is a sort of ADD.)

ADD
Apostrophe Disorder Disorder. This disorder is manifested mostly in men's, women's, and children's failure to place the apostrophe after the ess when forming plural nouns' possessive forms.

AD'D'
A shorter way o' writin' ``Apostrophic Dis'rder D'sorder,'' which is short for Apostrophic Disorder Disorder, whate'er that'd be.

ADD
Attention Deficit Disorder. ADHD is used more often now.

ADDA
Attention Deficit Disorder Association.

adder
A kind of snake that goeth-forth-and-multiplieth with logs.

Actual true fact: the word adder used to be nadder, but people hearing `a nadder' thought they heard `an adder,' and ignorance triumphed. (The Old English word was nædre.)

Changing in the opposite way, newt evolved from ewt, though the alternative eft did not get tagged. The same error occurred with awl (the cobbler's tool), which was often called nawl in the 15th through 17th centuries. For a similar example, see the nonce entry. The word druthers is based on a reananlysis of ``I'd rather,'' but here I think the error is intentional. These are generally instances of mistaken analysis of phrases. When the result is the loss of an initial sound, it is evidently an instance of apheresis.

A somewhat similar process is believed to have played a role in the evolution of our word orange. The fruit and the word both entered Europe from the Arabic-speaking world, and the Arabic name is typically transcribed naranj, close to the Persian (narang) and South Asian names (e.g., Sanskrit naranga). The Spanish (naranja), Medieval Greek (nerántzion), and early Italian (narancia) names all preserve or preserved the initial consonant, as some regional Italian varieties still do (e.g., Venetian naranza).

The English word comes from the Old French (contemporary with Middle English) orenge. The initial en is believed to have been lost in French (and later in Italian) at least somewhat as it was lost from nadder; the repeated en in une norenge (please don't hold me to the spelling) being simplified to une orenge (une orange, in Modern French). An added factor is that in medieval Latin manuscripts, the name of the fruit became associated through its color with the word for gold (aurum). (German has, in addition to a French cognate, the word Apfelsinne -- `apple of Zion.')

Going only slightly further afield, Ancient Greek had a common pun based on the preposition apo, which is contracted to ap' before a vowel: apo nou means `from a mind'; ap' onou means `from an ass.' This is especially compelling spoken or when written, as was once the case, without word spacing. I suppose that if in doubt, you could split the difference and translate this as `out of mind.'

ADDS
Antarctic Data Directory System.

ADDS
Army Data Distribution System.

addy
Address. I didn't make this up. I saw it in a mailing list posting.

ADDY
Registered trademark of an award bestowed by the AAF. May the Lord have mercy on your wretched soul.

ADE
Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis. See ADEM.

ADE
Advanced Development Environment.

ADE
Arizona Department of Education.

ADE
Asociación de Dirigentes de Empresa. Argentine `Association of Business Managers.' The name adopted in 1983 by the organization that had been, since its founding in 1942, the ADV (for `sales managers').

ADE
Association of Departments of English (and of writing programs and divisions of humanities).

ADEA
American Dental Education Association. Formerly AADS. (Don't just follow the link! It's a game -- you're supposed to try to guess first.)

ADEA
Age Discrimination in Employment Act (of 1967).

Here's the closing paragraph of an Ole Miss job advertisement of September 2002:

The University of Mississippi is an EEO/AA/Title VI/Title IX/Section 504/ADA/ADEA Employer.

If it weren't for acronyms and law-code numbering, job postings would consist mostly of disclaimer text. See the AA/EOE entry for more on want-ad etiquette.

ADEBA
Asociación de Bancos Argentinos. `Association of Argenitine Banks.' If La trama política de la apertura económica en la Argentina (1987-1996), by Aníbal Viguera (Ediciones al Margen, 2000), had an index, then I might be able to tell you ... Ah, here we go (pp. 45-6): ADEBA was a grouping of Argentine banks; while ABRA (you shouldn't ask) represented foreign banking with a presence in Argentina, and included Argentine subsidiaries of some of Argentina's largest foreign creditors. In the 1990's, reform of the financial sector led to the near disappearance of privately owned Argentine banks, and in 1998 ABRA and ADEBA merged to become ABA.

[dive flag]

ADEC
Asia Dive Exhibition and Conference. Why would they want to exhibit or conference at a dive? Don't they have any nice places?

ADEC
Association of Death Education and Counseling. ``Death Education''? Just do what comes naturally -- it's as easy as falling down. It seems a waste to train for something you'll only do once or twice.

ADEM
Acute Disseminated EncephaloMyelitis. Acute inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. A risk of many vaccines. It used to be especially common with antirabies vaccine, when its manufacture used animal spinal-cord cultures.

Aden
An important port of Yemen, located on -- get this: the Gulf of Aden. Alright, I admit I don't care either. I'm only putting this entry here to lay the groundwork for possible future humor opportunities. (Wordplay, linguistic subversion, whatever.) So we're prepositioning. It's a sleeper. It's the Manchurian Entry. You are getting verrry sleeeeepy. When I say ``control gee,'' you will wake up and have no recollection that this glossary entry ever took place.

ADF
American Dance Festival. Terry Teachout had a tutorial eulogy for American Dance in the July 1996 issue of Commentary.

ADF
Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dermatologische Forschung. German `Dermatology Research Working Group.'

ADF
Asian Development Fund. The arm of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that extends ``soft loans'' -- loans at zero interest.

She worryin' about the back rent -- Hah!
She be lucky to get the front rent!

George Thorogood, ``Housewoman Blues''

The nice thing about soft loans is that when you finally admit that they're nonperforming, you only have to write off the principal, and not any expected interest. Always remember: the key to long-term sustainable virtue (particularly charity) is doing it on someone else's nickel.

ADF
Automatic Direction Finder. A/k/a radio direction finder. [Avionics.]

ADF
Automatic Document Feeder. When the ADF light goes on on the photocopier, that's what's malfunctioning.

ADF&G
Alaska Department of Fish and Game. In 1998, their Hunter Education and Hunter Services statewide programs were joined to form the Hunter Information and Training program: HIT. It's gratifying to see that even governmental organizations are finally coming around to see the importance of felicitous acronyms. Trailer: A future glossary entry will celebrate a similar achievement by the postal service of a nearby country.

ad finem, ad fin.
Latin: `at [or near] the end,' in full and common abbreviated forms.

ADFL
Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaïre.

ADFL
Association of Departments of Foreign Languages.

ADFRF
(NASA's) Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility. Became DFRF, now DFRC.

ADH
Alcohol DeHydrogenase. One of three enzymes important in the formation of volatile compounds in ripening fruit (see the LOX entry).

ADH
AntiDiuretic Hormone.

ADH
Arkansas Department of Health.

ADHA
American Dental Hygienists' Association.

ADHD
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Same as ADD.

adhesion
Oliver Herford and an actor protected by anonymity are supposed to have had the following exchange once:
	     Anon.: I'm a smash hit.  Why, yesterday during the last act,
		    I had everyone glued to their seats!
	   Herford: Wonderful!  Wonderful!  Clever of you to think of it!

See also prosthetics and URW.

Near the end, if not exactly in the last act, of Rocky Horror Picture Show, Frank-N-Furter immobilizes his prey with a sonic transducer. When Brad Majors says ``It's as if we're glued to the spot!'' the standard audience response is ``My socks! I can't move my socks!''

ADHF
American Digestive Health Foundation. A conspiracy of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE) and the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) working together to ``advance digestive health through financial support of research and education in the causes, prevention, treatment, and cure of digestive diseases. To advance its digestive agenda [sic], the foundation has established four independent ...'' Look, you know that all they really want to do is ``advance'' your health by making you feel guilty about eating food that tastes good instead of diced bean sprouts in tepid spring water.

Add homonym
Fishy as a tack.

ADI
Acceptable Daily Intake. The plural (ADIs or ADI's, depending on your punctuation convention) also occurs.

ADI
After-Develop Inspection.

ADI
Alternating-Direction Implicit. A class of numerical integration schemes that mix implicit evolution along one dimension with explicit along the remainder, cycling the direction that is integrated implicitly. The compromise has the stability that one cannot get from purely explicit evolution, but is often much more tractable than fully implicit schemes.

ADI
Alzheimer's Disease International.

ADI
Analog Devices, Inc.

ADI
Association of Dental Implantology UK.

ADI
Attitude Direction Indicator.

A diamond is forever.
An advertising slogan created for the DeBeers cartel by the Ayer advertising agency. Of course, at room temperature diamond is an unstable allomorph of carbon. Eventually, and a lot sooner if you cook it, it turns to graphite. As advertising slogans go, however, this one is still pretty accurate.

ADIO
Analog/Digital Input/Output.

adiós
Good-bye in Spanish. `To God' (a Dios) contracted to one word. I suppose it's short for some earlier longer phrase that expressed a more complete thought, but offhand I don't know particularly. French has the similar adieu, which was borrowed into German and eventually corrupted into tschüss.

ADIRU
Air Data and Inertial Reference Unit.

A.D.I. (Sc.), A.D.I. (Science)
Assistant Director of Intelligence (SCience). This abbreviation occurs in Wizard War; it was the position held by the book's author within the British Air Ministry during WWII. Post-war, the position was elevated to D. of I. (R).

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Adj, adj.
Adjective. Ancient Greek grammarians did not regard this as a separate part of speech. They grouped what we now call nouns and adjectives together in one part of speech. Now you're beginning to understand why the old philosophers are often translated as having written stuff like ``the wet'' or ``the warm.''

Greek is inflected, so it is not surprising that word order is looser than in English. Things could get sticky, however. Greek has verbal expressions like to hygiainein, which literally translated would be something like `the to be healthy.' The definite article to is specifically the neuter singular. A reasonable translation of the phrase is `a state of good health' -- note that the distinction between definite and indefinite (indicated by the absence of a definite article) is not as sharp in Greek (or in most languages that have the distinction) as it is in English.

Some languages don't have words that fit our lexical category of adjectives. These languages typically use verbs to express ideas we use adjectives for -- something like ``the man goods'' for ``the man is good.'' The German verb schweigen is like that; it means `to be silent' the same way to roar in English means ``to be roaring.''

ADJ
(Brazilian) Associação de Diabetes Juvenil.

ADJ
Australian Dental Journal.

adjectives ending in -ly
This list is only as complete as I was able to make it before I began to feel like doing something more interesting, like HTML mark-up:
  1. aldermanly
  2. bimonthly
  3. birdly
  4. biweekly
  5. bodily
  6. brambly
  7. brotherly
  8. bubbly
  9. burly
  10. canoodly
  11. chilly
  12. clerkly
  13. comely
  14. costly
  15. courtly
  16. cowardly
  17. crawly
  18. crinkly
  19. crumbly
  20. cuddly
  21. curly
  22. curmudgeonly
  23. daily
  24. dangly
  25. dastardly
  26. daughterly
  27. deadly
  28. disorderly
  29. doctorly
  30. early
  31. easterly
  32. eely
  33. elderly
  34. fatherly
  35. fortnightly
  36. friendly
  37. frilly
  38. gainly
  39. gangly
  40. gentlemanly
  41. ghastly
  42. ghostly
  43. giggly
  44. gingerly
  45. girly
  46. gnarly
  47. godly
  48. goggly
  49. goodly
  50. googly
  51. grandfatherly
  52. grandmotherly
  53. gravelly
  54. grisly
  55. growly
  56. grumbly
  57. heavenly
  58. hilly
  59. holy
  60. homely
  61. hourly
  62. husbandly
  63. jangly
  64. jingly
  65. jolly
  66. jumbly
  67. kindly
  68. kingly
  69. knightly
  70. knobbly
  71. knubbly
  72. lawyerly
  73. leisurely
  74. likely
  75. lively
  76. lonely
  77. lordly
  78. lovely
  79. lowly
  80. maidenly
  81. manly
  82. marbly
  83. masterly
  84. matronly
  85. mealy
  86. measly
  87. melancholy
  88. miserly
  89. monthly
  90. motherly
  91. mumbly
  92. needly
  93. neighborly
  94. nightly
  95. northeasterly
  96. northerly
  97. northwesterly
  98. nubbly
  99. oily
  100. only
  101. orderly
  102. pearly
  103. pebbly
  104. portly
  105. prickly
  106. princely
  107. puddly
  108. pugly (this one is slang [< pug ugly], so it's okay if you didn't know it)
  109. purply
  110. quarterly
  111. queenly
  112. ripply
  113. rumbly
  114. scaly
  115. scholarly
  116. scraggly
  117. scrawly
  118. shambly
  119. shapely
  120. sickly
  121. silly
  122. sisterly
  123. slatternly
  124. slovenly
  125. sly
  126. smelly
  127. snarly
  128. sniffly
  129. snively, snivelly
  130. snuggly
  131. southeasterly
  132. southerly
  133. southwesterly
  134. sparkly
  135. spiderly
  136. spindly
  137. spinsterly
  138. sprawly
  139. spritely
  140. squally
  141. squealy
  142. squiggly
  143. squirrelly
  144. stately
  145. statesmanly
  146. straggly
  147. studly
  148. surly
  149. swirly
  150. teacherly
  151. timely
  152. tingly
  153. tinkly
  154. tinselly
  155. touchy-feely
  156. unearthly
  157. unfriendly
  158. ungainly
  159. ungodly
  160. unholy
  161. unlikely
  162. unmanly
  163. unwomanly
  164. unruly
  165. unscholarly
  166. unsightly
  167. untimely
  168. unworldly
  169. waddly
  170. weaselly
  171. weekly
  172. westerly
  173. whirly
  174. wiggly
  175. wifely
  176. wily
  177. wobbly
  178. womanly
  179. woolly
  180. worldly
  181. wriggly
  182. wrinkly
  183. yearly
  184. yeomanly
  185. yonderly

Some of these, particularly those having to do with time periods, also function as adverbs. I've omitted nouns that function attributively (i.e., adjectivally), as in assembly hall, fly paper, jelly doughnut, lily pad, etc. I've also omitted many of the possibly nonce forms that arise from the still-productive un- prefix (unmaidenly, unstately, etc.). Some -ly adjectives arise from the application of -y to words ending in l or le, and this is also still productive. The latest such production in the above list is probably canoodly. The -ly ending itself is still producing adjectives. I think birdly is a jocular recent instance.

ADL
Activities of Daily Living. As opposed to the activities of hourly or fortnightly living. YMMV.

The quotidian activities normally referred to as ADL's include eating, dressing and bathing. I've had days when I omitted to do one of these. More advanced stuff comes under the IADL heading.

ADL
Advanced Distributed Learning.

ADL
Advances in Digital Libraries. A conference.

ADL
Alexandria Digital Library.

ADL
A netlist format.

ADL
Anti-Defamation League. Of the Bnai-Brith.

adlect
To adlect (to or into a rank or role) is (or rather was) to use the power of adlection to so elevate a person or persons.

adlection
Appointment to a governing body (especially the Roman Senate) or elevation to a position of higher status, by decision of the emperor as opposed to election. The verb adlect was backformed from this, evidently on the pattern of elect, election. Adlection was introduced by the first Roman emperor, Julius Caesar, and the term seems to be used only in reference to the pre-medieval Roman empires.

ADLIB
Advanced Database Linkages In Biotechnology. Apparently defunct when I looked for it in January 2005.

[column]

ad lib.
Latin ad libitum, roughly `as one wishes.' The word libitum is constructed from the past participle of libere, `to please.' Ad libitum is used in musical notation to indicate that a movement may be omitted or altered by the performer. Of course, the performer may omit or alter whatever he likes, or unintentionally, but this is the way the thing is stated. What it really means is that the composer is inviting the performer to improvise. The usual definition entails the polite and not unreasonable assumption that the performer normally attempts to follow the composer's specific intentions closely.

ad lib
Adverb meaning `extemporaneously, in an improvised way.' A somewhat extended use of the Latin ad lib. Like native prepositional phrases, this adverbial is placed after the verb. (``He spoke ad lib.'')

ad-lib
Improvisational or extemporaneous. An adjective applied mostly to speech productions in social intercourse. I said ``social,'' you pervert!

ad lib
Improvisation. A noun referring mostly to speech productions in social intercourse. I hope that explanation was clear; I just made it up off the top of my head.

A word game called Mad Libs®, which produced absurd phrases, was popular in ancient times (created by Leonard Stern and Roger Price in 1953, and first available commercially around 1958). This probably contributed to the popularity of the term ``ad lib'' among the unwashed masses and to its use as a noun, and to the general decline of civilization.

ad-lib
Verb meaning `improvise,' particularly in a speech or other performance. Derived from ad lib. Sometimes written without the hyphen.

[column]

ad loc.
Latin, ad locum. `at the location ....'

You're probably asking: ``like, where else, dude?''

ADLS
Adaptive Device Locator System. It's kind of fun even if you're not looking for anything, like window[s] shopping.

I pronounce ADLS as ``addles.'' You should too.

ADM
Academy of Dental Materials. ``The Academy of Dental Materials was founded in 1941 as a consortium of dental professionals who were interested in the development and application of new materials to dental care. The objectives of the Academy are: 1) to provide a forum for the exchange of information on all aspects of dental materials; 2) to enhance communication between industry, researchers and practicing dentists; 3) to encourage dental materials research and its applications; and 4) to promote dental materials through its activities.''

ADM
Adaptive-Delta Modulation.

ADM
Add/Drop Multiplexer. See also ADM 3X.

ADM, Adm.
ADMinistrat{ or | ion }. Cf. sysadmin.

Adm., ADM
ADMiral[ty]. See VADM for the etymology of admiral.

ADM
Archer Daniels Midland. ``Supermarket to the world'' in the opaque description given in the sponsor segments of public TV. Apparently the antitrust division of the Treasury Department decided it meant ``lecithin price-fixer for the world.''

An article entitled ``3 Giant Feed Companies Agree to Settle Price-Fixing Charges'' in the Wednesday, August 28, 1996 New York Times (C1 -- first page of the business section) describes Archer Daniels as a ``giant grain concern that has long been one of the nation's most influential and politically powerful corporations.'' The article reported that Kyowa Hakko Kogyo of Japan and Sewon America, Inc. would plead guilty, and Ajinmoto Company of Japan no contest in a plea bargain on criminal charges concerning an alleged conspiracy to fix prices in the 600 megabuck market for the food additive lysine, which they produce. In the agreement, one executive from each of the companies pleads guilty to a criminal charge and provides testimony and documents for an investigation whose apparent central target was ADM. I haven't been keeping up with this story, but I was always curious about this sponsor of public broadcasting programs.

In September 1998, three former executives of ADM Co. were convicted of conspiring with Japanese and Korean competitors to fix prices and allocate production for lysine. On July 9, 1999, they were sentenced to prison terms. It was a really weird situation (and I really mean that): the government informant Mark Whitacre had been embezzling millions from the company after alerting Federal investigators to the price-fixing scheme in 1992. He got a nine-year term for that, which he was already serving on July 9. Prosecutors had argued that the two others sentenced, Michael Andreas (son of former chairman Dwayne Andreas) and Terrance Wilson, had masterminded the scheme. Judge Blanche Manning ruled that they had not, but that Whitacre (their subordinate) was a manager of the conspiracy. The lawyers for Andreas and Wilson objected to this unexplained ruling, and the lawyer for Whitacre did not -- all strange since managing the conspiracy increased culpability and, under Federal sentencing guidelines, required Whitacre's sentence to be increased. I'm sure there's something important here that I'm not understanding, and I don't think it's résumé padding.

ADM
Arnowitt-Deser-Misner. The ADM split is a procedure for recoordinatizing a patch of spacetime into a decomposed canonical form expressed in terms of the three-space metric and a lapse function and shift function (a three-vector) that represent how different time slices fit together.

ADM
Assyrian Democratic Movement. A movement of Assyrians in Iraq.

Last year I got into a conversation with the limo driver on the way to Newark Airport, and I took a guess from accent and appearance that he was Serbian. He said that I was close -- he was from Turkey. So he was Turkish? No, Aramean. My jaw fell off. I knew who the Arameans were, er, are! His turn to drop jaw.

ADM
Average Daily Membership.

ADMA
Aviation Distributors and Manufacturers Association.

admass
MASS-media ADvertising. An acronym, with plural admasses. One hardly needs to be reminded that Madison Avenue is a philistine enemy of the English language. All three major Scrabble dictionaries accept this word, but TWL98 draws the line at the plural.

ADME
Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, and Excretion.

admin
Short for sysadmin. Cf. Adm.

Admission is free and open to the general public.
It's educational, so no one is interested. If they said that admission is selective and you have to stay for four years, they could charge $100,000.

ADMSEP
Association of the Directors of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry. Mark Reed of Dartmouth Medical College is a member. Mark Reed is a member of the Electrical Engineering Faculty at Yale. This would be quite interesting if they were the same person. For related ruminations, see the Johnson entry.

ADM 3X
Add/Drop Multiplexer (AMD) for DS3.

ADN
Acción Democrática Nacionalista. Spanish: `Nationalist Democratic Action,' a Bolivian political party.

ADN
Ácido desoxirribonucleico. Spanish for `DNA,' q.v. (The doubling of the r of ribo- after the prefix is conventional for Spanish: the sound of initial r is much closer to that of -rr- than to that of -r- within a word -- cf. ARN.)

ADN, adn
Any Day Now. Chatese, texting abbreviation.

Pigs will fly. (I mean fly economy class.)

ADN
Associate's Degree in Nursing.

aDNA
Ancient DNA.

ADO
(Microsoft) ActiveX Data Object[s].

ADO
Army Digitization Office.

ADO
Assyrian Democratic Organization.

One time when I took a limousine from my mother's house to Newark Airport (EWR), the driver asked me to guess where he was from. Looking at his face and not the displayed cabbie ID, I guessed he was from Serbia or thereabouts, and he said I wasn't too far off. He was from Istanbul, and he was an Aramean. He was astounded that I knew what an Aramean was, and I was astounded that there were still people who call themselves Arameans. It was like going fishing and reeling in a coelacanth. The cab companies that serve the New York-area airports really go out of their way to give you a cosmopolitan experience.

Oh -- I see I already told this story at the ADM entry. Anyway, he treated the terms ``Assyrian'' and ``Aramaic'' as equivalent. There's a historical reason for this.

ADO, Ado
Common abbreviation for Shakespeare's play Much Ado About Nothing.

adobe
Sun-dried (i.e., not oven-fired) clay (Nontechnical term: mud) bricks (typically with straw inside); also the material for those bricks, and buildings made from such bricks. Appropriate only in dry climates, since the mud dissolves away in the rain; still, pre-Columbian pyramids in Mexico still stand, while limestone pyramids in Egypt are dissolving in the acidic rain. Adobe bricks tend to be much larger than standard (concrete) bricks.

Adobe Flash plugin has crashed
Adobe Flash plugin is dysfunctioning normally.

Adobe Systems Inc.
Adobe made PostScript and makes a variety of related software products. More than with most software, there is some confusion about what PostScript and Adobe fonts are.

The thing to understand about fonts generally is that text and graphics are treated very differently (by printers and by computers and computer screens). While in principle, there is no difference between the physical method used to produce the image of an alphabetic character or a graphic of the same size, in terms of raw memory there is a great difference: the single black-and-white graphic (no grayscale) takes as much memory as the single character, but a page of text contains many repetitions of the same characters, while every character-size region of graphic requires its own memory-hogging description.

Adobe fonts are different kinds of character descriptions. Adobe fonts (type 1) are described not by bit maps but by parameters for scalable curves that define the boundaries of a character.

ADOE
Associated Dealers Of Europe. A Dutch-based B2B group. They have tabs for Audi, Volkswagen, Land Rover, Peugeot (the French connection), and Seat. ADOE's website says it ``is specialised in sourcing new cars within the EU for delivery in the United Kingdom.'' Audi and Seat are VW subsidiaries, and Peugeot is the second-largest European automaker after VW. I don't get what Land Rover is doing there, exactly. ADOE demonstrates a charming versatility in sourcing UK-manufactured cars for delivery in the UK. Ford-owned Land Rover was put up for sale in June 2007. (It's still up for sale as of this writing, September 2007.)

ADON
Assistant DON. Not a mafia usage. Look, just follow the link, nobody will get hurt.

ADONIS
Article Delivery Over Network Information Systems. The way journal subscription prices have been rising over the past few years (say 10-15% per year, with a fraction of that figured to compensate for the libraries that cancel), it seems 1996 will see rapid growth in electronic journal access. The main journals in which I have published are all moving to put their articles on line.

Gee, now it's the year 2000 and I'm still reading hard-copy.

ADP
{Administrative | Advanced | Automat{ic|ed}} Data Processing.

ADP
Adenosine DiPhosphate. Vide ATP.

ADP
Aéroports de Paris. Operates Roissy-CDG and Aéroport d'Orly (ORY).

ADP
Ammonium Dihydrogen Phosphate (NH4H2PO4). Along with KDP a popular crystal for second-harmonic generation in nonlinear optics. Cleveland Crystals offers a tutorial. Cf. AD*P.

AD*P
Deuterated ADP (q.v.): Ammonium dideuterium phosphate. They even use deuterated ammonia. (ND4D2PO4). Most properties, as one would expect, are similar to the majority-isotope ADP. However, the piezoelectric coefficients can be almost a factor of as much as five larger for fully-deuterated AD*P.

ADPCM
Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation. ITU-TS standard for voice digitization and compression, for transmission on up-to-32Kbps channel. Differs from mere DPCM in decreasing the sampling rate when samples vary more slowly.

Dallas Semiconductor lists some here.

ADPA
Alcohol & Drug Program Administration of the ``Los Angeles County Department of Health Services - Public Health,'' which you're welcome to parse yourself.

ADPE
Automated Data Processing Equipment.

ADPS
Automated Data Processing System.

ADPSR
Architects, Designers & Planners for Social Responsibility.

ad q.s.
See q.s. (That's not what it means; it's what you should do.)

ADR
Accident Data Recorder.

ADR
Achievable Data Rate.

ADR, A.D.R.
Additional Dialogue Replacement. It is really additional, because it's usually a ``replacement'' for something that wasn't there in the first place. It's not usually what you would call dialogue either. It's also expanded as ``Automatic Dialogue Replacement,'' although it doesn't seem especially automatic. Many initialisms conceal inappropriate expansions, but this one is outstanding. Well, it stands out, anyway. What the initialism really needs is additional work, replacing the work that was not initially done in creating it, and which isn't just dialogue.

Okay, a little more directly, with the stern warning that the explanation following is written by someone outside the industry (that would be me) who is just trying his best, or maybe his second best. The movie industry has a number of terms for various related kinds of work that it finds important to distinguish. (The pay scales are different; that'd make it important to you too.) Some of this technical terminology refers to ``dialogue,'' which in the industry can mean any utterance of the human voice, even if it is a monologue or a scream. (Sometimes the oddity of including howls in ``dialogue'' seems a bit much, and they refer to ``dialogue and vocalizations.'')

If the dialogue of an individual artist visible on screen is replaced by the same artist, that is called dubbing or post-synchronization. If the visible actor's voice is replaced with someone else's voice, that is revoicing. (Yes, this is also inconsistent with ordinary usage for foreign-language dubbing.) Dialogue can also be a voice-over or commentary out of vision, which may or may not be recorded by a voice actor who appears and is represented as being the speaker. The movie ``What's Up Tiger Lily?'' offers an example of the latter. The studio took it out of Woody Allen's hands when it was 60 minutes long and lengthened it by adding 19 minutes of perfectly irrelevant footage of the ``Lovin' Spoonful'' and added commentary by someone mimicking Woody Allen's voice. (Don't tell me that for that kind of movie, irrelevance is a plus; I said it was ``perfectly'' irrelevant.) In the closing credits, Allen's commentary is also revoiced. Or perhaps the precise lingo would have the movie just recommented there.

Dubbing, post-sync, and revoicing are closely related to the performance of an individual character seen on screen. Voice-overs and commentary are a step removed from this: they are the performances of individual characters, however sketchily identified, who are not on screen. As explained in this pay-scales agreement (see Appendix FI, on p. 48), A.D.R. (Additional Dialogue Replacement or Automatic Dialogue Replacement) is not predominantly concerned with performance in character but has to do with the creation of atmosphere and general characteristic sounds and dialogue to fit with the action, often over crowd scenes.

ADR
Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator.

ADR
Aggregate Data Rate.

ADR
Alternative Dispute Resolution. Mediation or arbitration (vide AAA).

ADR
Alzheimer's Disease Research. The name, in the linked instance, of a program of AHAF.

ADR
American Depository Receipt. A common way for foreign firms to list on the NYSE. A number of shares are bought and transferred to a US-based trust, and then receipts representing the shares are issued and traded in the US. By breaking up the group of shares outstanding into pools traded separately, one avoids the use of a foreign transfer agent.

Besides avoiding those hassles, it has an additional positive advantage. An ADR may represent more than one share of the original stock, and this allows the normal price range of a board lot to be conformed to different exchanges: For example, the usual prices for shares traded on the FTSE are about a tenth of the prices seen on the NYSE, and would run afoul of ``penny stock'' rules on shorting and margin in many brokerages. The ADR's for British Telecom and British Steel each represent 10 real shares.

It seems like things might get trickier if one wanted to go in the other direction: trade in receipts for US shares at prices conventional for FTSE.

ADR
ASTRA Digital Radio. ASTRA is a European satellite system. The system was proposed by the Société Européenne des Satellites (SES).

ADR
Automated Dialogue Replacement. I've seen this described as a ``process by which dialogue recorded on-set is replaced after the event in more controlled studio conditions'' but the process is unclear to me. See this other ostensibly equivalent ``ADR'' for other stuff I don't understand.

ADRC
Agence des douanes et du revenu du Canada. English name: Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (CCRA). It used to be called Revenu Canada (RevCan), but they changed the name in 1999. If you were waiting for this glossary to alert you to the change, you may have some late penalties to pay.

In fact, the ADRC (or the CCRA, if you prefer) no longer exists as such. Wait, wait, don't cheer yet. The taxman just discarded some of his less lucrative distractions and changed his name. Now you pay taxes to the ARC (CRA in English).

adret
A French word for the side of a mountain (more) exposed to the sun. See ubac.

ADR gauge
Analog-to-Digital Recording (tide) gauge.

ADROIT
Analysis of Dispersal Risk Occurring In Transportation. Simulation code developed at Sandia National Laboratories for the Defense Programs Transportation Risk Analysis study. Used to evaluate the accident risk posed by the expected transfers of weapons, plutonium, weapons components, and tritium reservoirs. This code can accept ERAD data sets to model explosively driven events.

ADS
Advanced Digital System.

ADS
Advanced Distributed Simulation. Cf. DIS.

ADS
Alaska Dental Society. I-I-I c-c-can't-t st-top ch-chat-ter-ering!

ADS
Alternative Depreciation System.

ADS
American Dialect Society. Their homepage claims: ``Founded more than a century ago, the American Dialect Society still is the one scholarly association dedicated to the study of the English language in North America - and of other languages or dialects of other languages influencing it or influenced by it.''

Founded 1889, a constituent society of the ACLS since 1962. ACLS has an overview.

AdS
Anti-de Sitter (space).

ADS
Archaeology Data Service. It ``supports research, learning and teaching with high quality and dependable digital resources. It does this by preserving digital data in the long term, and by promoting and disseminating a broad range of data in archaeology. The ADS promotes good practice in the use of digital data in archaeology, it provides technical advice to the research community, and supports the deployment of digital technologies.''

ADS, ads
Astrophysics Data System. Funded by NASA.

ADS
Automated Data System.

ADS
Autonomous Decentralized System[s]. There's an international symposium -- ISADS.

ADSAM
Air-Directed Surface-to-Air Missile.

ADSC
Association of Drilled Shaft Contractors, originally founded in 1972. It now styles itself ``ADSC: The International Association of Foundation Drilling.'' (See the sealed acronym entry for similar name evolutions.)

ADSC's flagship periodical is called Foundation Drilling. My comments on it are based on the issue of June/July 2007. It's a saddle-stitched heavy-paper glossy of approximately 78 inside pages, four-color throughout, with good non-smearing ink and probably quite healthy advertising revenue. One of the regular features is called ``Slide Rules.'' It sure does.

[Phone icon]

ADS-L
American Dialect Society (email discussion) List. A mailing list ``for members of the American Dialect Society [ADS] and interested others. Our primary topic of conversation is dialects of North American English, but we do wander off topic frequently.''

Archives searchable back to 1992.

ADSL
Asymmetric Digital Subscriber { Line | Loop }. A telecommunications protocol for standard (plain ol' copper) phone lines with a nominal data rate of 6.144 Mbps, originally intended for MPEG compressed video. Here're a couple of pages of semitechnical description. Here's an explanation that's a bit more useful if you know Japanese. It also helps if you visited it before it went 404. Whatis?com offers a little information.

``Asymmetric'' refers to the fact that the downstream half of the duplex (from central office (CO) to home) accommodates 6.144 Mbps, while upstream is only 640Kbps. The multiplexing is by OFDM.

ADSP
AppleTalk Data Stream Protocol.

ADSU
ATM Data Service Unit (DSU).

ADT
Abstract Data Type.

ADT
ADulT. Airline fare abbreviation. Child is CHD.

ADTDL
Army Doctrine and Training Digital Library. They offer an acronym search.

ADTS
Automated Digital Terminal Systems.

ADTV
Advanced Definition TeleVision. Name preferred by FCC over HDTV.

ADU
Accessory Dwelling Unit. A separate housing arrangement within a single-family home. An ADU, according to Medicare is ``a complete living unit and includes a private kitchen and bath.''

adult beverage
I just heard this term in a radio advertisement. It can't just mean ``alcoholic beverage,'' because that would make it a pointless euphemism. It must have a more specific meaning. It's a funny term. Cocktails usually have funny names. ``Cocktail'' itself is a funny name. An ``Adult Beverage'' is probably a bourbon and Geritol on ice.

adult education
An attractive single woman of my acquaintance is looking for a man. (It has been made clear to me with really quite unnecessary emphasis that I am not that man.) She's in a hurry, so she signed up for some evening classes (ooh, I'm takin' it on the chin). You know: get out, get into circulation, meet people ... of the appropriate gender. Appropriate people of the appropriate gender. (Latest update: she didn't find the man. She went to plan B: IVF-assisted single motherhood. Gary was as weirded out as I was, and he also thought I was takin' it on the chin. I haven't even told him that she's doing another round, for gender balance or whatever. See the Oxbridge entry for whole population segments takin' it on the chin.)

In one course, she visited eight different jazz clubs in as many weeks. Enrollment: eight women, zero men. Maybe this is understandable. The other course (there's precedent for calling this sort of thing a ``course'') is like the jazz club thing but with pubs. Night classes focusing on pubs, homework measured in mugs and pitchers -- you'd expect some men might sign up for this sort of education, and you'd be right. Enrollment: sixteen women, two men. One of the men actually showed up. For the second, uh, class meeting, fewer women showed up. I guess they just didn't have a sincere interest in ale.

Single women go in for adult ``education''; single men go in for ``adult'' books. (Book)Mark my words, it'll come to this: adult education courses about adult books. You'll know why. Lesson I: how to tell a romance novel from an adult book by its cover. (Romance novels are swash-font positive.)

The term ``student body'' will never have the same meaning for me again. (Not that it ever did, though.)

Ladies, here's a good kind of course to take to meet guys: driver safety courses. Check out the PTD entry for details. The sex distribution is a bit more representative of the driving population, but getting signed up for this is trickier than for beer or jazz-club education. Still, it may not be necessary for you to get caught speeding; maybe you could arrange to impede the flow of traffic or something. Check out the laws in your state.

Robert says a course in Internet Technology that he took at Stanford had a fairly even gender distribution, but most students were married. A Japanese language course he took in the mid-nineties had a reasonable distribution of singles also. Alright, more good ideas for the lonely cardiac muscle: one of my guard pals at the library, by way of conclusion to his regular rant about incompetent library management, says he's been married to his wife for about a century (I didn't catch the precise figure), ``God bless her. BUT, of the 200 employees in the library, 180 are women, and THAT's the problem.'' I told him that this wasn't going to change anytime soon. Light bulb! One for the guys! There's even a cute one working at circ, and they have a regular turn-over of work-study girls.

Getting back to that liquid culture course, you know, I'm wondering just what kind of ``man'' would let someone else tell him what brew he should drink. Hmm. Well, the first pub I entered the first time I visited England, I said to the barmaid ``I don't know the beers here. What do I want to drink?'' I figured she would recommend whatever people with my accent drink. She chose a Foster's. I liked it, and I'm not even from Oz. (There should be more about the Aussie accent at the Polish entry. More accurate stuff, anyway. But there isn't.)

Update 2002: there's another text-based mate-search tool: personals! In my continuing [throat-clearing noises] sociological research, I have become aware of a paperback tome entitled Playing the Personals, based on research by one Claudia Beakman, assisted by experienced author Karla Dougherty. On page 9 they state

Personals Commandment #1:

Thou Shalt Not Be Embarrassed
As they explain, ``it's time for personals to shake off the stigma and come out of the closet.''

Well, heartened by this, let me stride right out of the closet into the foyer and finally get this off my chest: I admit it, I uh, I use the personals. (You probably haven't recognized me from my ads, since there I'm taller, leaner, younger, wealthier, more cultured and yet more down-to-earth, and all-around more impressive, but I'm still that same old modest, honest Al that you've never met.) Hmm. It says here on the back cover that ``Claudia Beakman is a pseudonym for a vice president of a major television company.'' Oh. Thanks, girlfriend.

Anyway, the relevance to this entry (``adult education,'' remember?) comes on page 7. (And maybe further on; I haven't, like, made a thorough review of the text, you know?) The dilemma is posed, and brand-X dating strategies are fairly reviewed and trashed:

Over the years, you've ... spent a fortune taking courses you had no interest in pursuing. You've taken scuba lessons even though you don't know how to swim. You've spent hours in art museums and libraries, and all this culture has been grand, but your feet ache and you're getting tired and you're still alone.

It turns out that the answer is as simple as reading your newspaper, once you've got this volume of expert advice, which you can purchase at finer book discount warehouses anywhere. I got mine off a dollar table at Bargain Books. They have a location near you if you live between Ann Arbor and Chicago. (More about this chain at the OOP entry.)

I probably should have mentioned earlier that there's an emerging, or sharpening, semantic distinction between ``adult education'' and ``continuing education,'' at least in the US. ``Adult education'' is tending to mean remedial education: high-school education for adults who dropped out (possibly before they were adults). Many attend adult education classes in order to earn a GED. Increasingly in contrast, ``continuing education'' refers to college courses taken by adults not matriculated for a degree. (Often they're preparing for a certification, like MOUS.)

FLASH! Here's something that might be useful to single men: According to Suzanne Freeman, in her article ``End of Discussion: Why I'm leaving my book group'' for the Winter 2005 issue of The American Scholar ($6.95 / $9.00 Canada):

In many ways, it's difficult to avoid being a member of a book club these days, especially if you're female. Almost all of my women friends belong to one, and some to more than one. Nobody can say for sure just how many of these groups there are across the country, but the estimated number has quadrupled, from 250,000 ten years ago, to a million or more today. If, by some miracle, you have managed to miss this bandwagon, there are now all kinds of self-styled experts who are ready to help you hop aboard.

Okay, here's another one for the ladies: gyms. No, not those silly places that are mostly about jazzercise or spinning or yoga or Pilates or whatever is popular these days. I don't mean a place with a swimming pool, and you know I don't mean ExerciseUSA, which has different days for men and women. I mean weight rooms. Places with lots of black padding, free weights, and machinery that looks like it sprang from the frothy imagination of an elementary-mechanics textbook author. Oh yeah, maybe some aerobics machines to warm up. The clientele at the blue-collarish workout club I used to go to is great for the girl who likes a man in or out of uniform: lots of cops and national guard reservists. It averaged no less than 85% male any time of day. Of course, that was the problem for me. I mean--the time of day, of course! Now I'm a member of an Anytime Fitness club, with 24-hour card access. (Even there, police officers form a disproportionate fraction of the membership.)

adv.
ADVerb. <-- That's a capitalized period, see? I capitalize the parts of a term that appear in its abbreviation, usually. (I usually use boldface instead of capitalization with foreign terms. The notion behind this is that readers of this glossary have a good enough idea of how capitalization works in English that using capitalization to indicate abbreviation source letters causes no confusion. Boldface is used with foreign terms because capitalization conventions in other languages are different and unknown to many users of this resource. Overall, this is a stupid approach. I should never have started using extra capitalization to indicate the obvious, but after a few thousand entries it was a case of stare decisis. I envy all the web-based lexicographers who just use capital letters, but this resource is just a bit too discursive for the shouting approach. If I live long enough, there will probably be a fix of some sort, but there are other priorities right now. I should probably explain this situation in some sort of help file, but no one ever reads help files. I simply expect everyone to read through the glossary multiple times, so everything gradually becomes clear despite my inarticulateness. That's how science books work, by the way. Jack, the editor of his own scientific journal, was the first person to advise me to read backwards from the end when proof-reading my own article. That never really worked for me; maybe I should try doing it with a mirror, like Leonardo.

Francesca tells me that when she copy-edits a long work, she goes straight through from the beginning and then goes back and does the first 20% over again. She explains that it takes the first 20% or so to figure things out, so she has to go back and recheck that part. See also the discussion of mission creep under DGE.

Oh yeah:) That was just an aside. The real subject of this entry is adverbs. And adverbials. As is typical in linguistic typology, one word (adverb in this case) names both a syntactic role and the kind of single word that can serve that role. An adverbial is a phrase that plays the role of an adverb; it's short for adverbial phrase. Most adverbials are prepositional phrases.

In English, adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, and larger syntactic units like sentences. The last are sometimes distinguished from the others, and may have different meanings. In most cases, it's not a big deal. Probably the one adverb (or is that two?) whose usage causes the greatest fury is hopefully.

The verb adverb hopefully indicates that the agent performing the action of the verb is hopeful (an adjective). ``He asked hopefully'' means that he asked with hope (probably of a satisfactory answer). Hope implies uncertainty and concern, so this adverb also implies trepidation. The sentence adverb hopefully indicates that the speaker or writer of the sentence is hopeful, rather than the subject of the sentence. ``Hopefully things will go well'' means that the speaker hopes that things will go well. This usage is widespread, and irritation at this usage is also quite widespread, but less so. One objection to the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb is that it's superfluous. It can usually be replaced with an expression like ``it is to be hoped that'' (which may seem overformal) or ``I hope that'' (which may seem overpersonal). Another objection is the ambiguity of expressions like ``Hopefully he told her.''

In Spanish, a large class of adverbs are constructed by applying the suffix -mente to an adjective. French uses -ment in a similar way, but -ment words in English are nouns (see next paragraph). French adverbs in -ment correspond to English adverbs in -ly (e.g.: cordialement, probablement). The preceding statements that contain the word French should be understood to represent my own ignorant guesses. (But sincere ignorant guesses! Or is that sincerely ignorant guesses?)

The -ment ending in English yields a noun from a verb stem. This also comes from French. It goes back to the Latin suffix -mentum, which when added to a verb stem yielded a noun. (Spanish constructs such nouns with -mento or -menta.)

AFAIK, Germanic languages all have cognates of -ly. Dutch and Afrikaans use -lijk and -lik. German has -lich, but the distinction between adverbs and adjectives has largely disappeared. That is, the uninflected form of an adjective is also an adverb, something like fast in English. (Please don't bring up adjectival predicates.) German does have a large class of adverbs (ending in -weise, cognate with English -wise) that do not function as adjectives. For some further discussion of that distinction, see the see through entry.

ADV
Asociación de Dirigentes de Venta. Argentine `Association of Sales Managers,' founded in 1942.

It's slightly cute that the acronym suggests something as relevant as advertise, but it doesn't do so in Spanish. Aviso is Spanish for `advertisement,' and advertir is `warn.' That's right, amigo, we're talkin' falso amigo. So it was no great loss to Acronymia when ADV became ADE in 1983.

AdvanceTrac
A Ford synonym for electronic stability control. For other synonyms, see the ESC entry.

advice
I suggest you always give patently stupid advice that no one in his right mind would or even could follow, and add that ``if you don't, you'll be sorry!'' or words to that effect. They won't, and then when things go wrong, you can say ``I told you so'' or words to that effect. Keep a safe distance.

Don't worry about things going right. They never do, and when they do, nobody will mention it. When they mention it, say ``just wait,'' ``we're not out of the woods yet,'' or words to that effect.

Freud theorized that depression is aggression turned inward (or so it is claimed). I theorize that advice is New Year's resolutions turned outward.

advThanksance
THANKS in ADV ANCE. The usage TIA is much preferred.

The corresponding phrase in Spanish is gracias de antemano (a more literal translation would be `thanks beforehand'). There's no special reason why you should know any of that.

It is more important to know that the head term is a rebus-like

           p l a y
          --------- ,
          word word
and hence repugnant to the discriminating reader. Therefore, its use should always be accompanied by advapologiesance.

The word advance seems to entice punsters. During the US Civil War, North Carolina's Zebulon Baird Vance was by far the most effective state governor in the Confederacy. Among the less significant things he did was to invest, on behalf of the state, in a blockade-runner that was named the Ad Vance. (You probably want to know how successful it was. It would be funnier if I simply observed the fact of your interest and left it at that, but I'm a bit compulsive, so I'll have to tell you. Fortunately, some of you don't care.) The Ad Vance was launched in July 1862. This is surprising, because Vance was first elected governor of North Carolina on August 6, 1862. Maybe I'll look into that some day. The Ad Vance made 20 successful voyages before being captured by the USS Santiago de Cuba in 1864.

The use of word infix in rebus-like representations of prepositional phrases in in was the theme of the February 3, 2000, NYT crossword puzzle, constructed by Thomas W. Schier. Here are the theme clues and answers (punctuation and capitalization follow constructor conventions):

"1960's sci-fi series"         SPLOSTACE
"Arrives ahead of schedule"    EGETSARLY
"Example"                      POCASEINT
"Start, as a chain of events"  MOTSETION
"Jack Benny's theme song"      BLOLOVEOM
"Write or call"                TOUCKEEPH

ADW
Aged/Disabled Waiver. A Medicaid program established in 1982 by Medicaid, which also in some places (e.g., chapter 500 of the Medicaid Regulations) expands ADW as ``Aged/Disabled Home and Community-Based Services Waiver.'' Bureaucrat humor. (The first expansion I gave is used in the text of chap. 300, though the running head uses the same expansion as ch. 500.)

``You will, I am sure agree with me that if page 534 finds us only in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.'' This declaration occurs in chapter 1 of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear. Donald Knuth quotes it on page 463 of his The Art of Computing: I. Fundamental Algorithms. The quote occurs at the end of chapter 2 (``Information Structures''), which I suppose is Knuth's paratactic way of noting that it's possible for chapter 2 to be long and chapter 1 short.

Francis Bacon, ``I do not pronounce upon anything.'' This appears at V, 210 of his Collected Works. Nice of him to point that out. (You can imagine my shock when I first read that and mistook the comma for a period: V. 210.)

This State of Florida document expands ADW as ``Aged and Disabled Adult Waiver.'' That seems to imply that it doesn't cover disabled juveniles. I think that's wrong, but fortunately, I don't have to find out.

adynaton
A figure of speech which indicates impossibility by comparison with an acknowledged impossibility. ``When pigs fly.''

I don't know if something like ``an ice cube's chance in hell'' or ``an ant's chance at an aardvark convention'' always qualifies. (Of course, the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno burns with cold.)

A figure of speech that's usually more poetical, but which has a similar-sounding name, is asyndeton. The latter word seems to me to be much more common, but googling seems to indicate that it's only somewhat more common.

ADZ
Airport Development Zone.

ADZU, AdZU
Ateneo de Zamboanga University. A Jesuit school in Zamboanga Peninsula (an administrative region of the southern Philippines comprising three provinces previously known as Western Mindanao). It was founded as a parochial school in 1912, and the institution includes a grade school (on the same campus as the colleges of the university) and a high school on a separate campus.

Such an arrangement is not entirely unknown even in the US. I know a couple of elementary-school teachers who work on the campus of a university in southwestern Michigan. The terminological inconveniences are minor. (``I graduated from Ateneo de Zamboanga University High School.'')

adzuki
A Japanese bean.

ADZY
ADviSorY. Phonetic aviation acronym. And I thought Broken English was the international language of science.

adzy
Like an adze.

A&E
Accident & Emergency. An attributive noun that modifies nurse, nursing, medicine, department, etc. In England, ``A&E;'' or ``A&E Department'' is widely used for the emergency department of a hospital, equivalent to ED (or, metonymically, ER) in the US.

All aloooong, alooong, there were incidents and accidents. (And Betty when you call me you can call me ``Al.'')

AE
Acoustic Emission.

AE
Acrodermatitis Enteropathica. A hereditary disease of childhood. Symptoms include a severe rash, loss of immune function, and drastic behavioral changes. See E. J. Moynahan: ``Acrodermatitis enteropathica: a lethal inherited human zinc deficiency disorder,'' Lancet, vol. 2, pp. 399-400 (1974).

Apparently, the disease results from a genetic defect that prevents breakdown of tryptophan before the point where picolinate is produced. The picolinate shortage is apparently most noticeable in the reduced ability to extract zinc from food in the intestines. Other chelators, particularly hydroxyquinoline, are effective substitutes.

A.E.
Acta Eruditorum. A journal about which all I know is that G.W. Leibniz published a number of papers in it. The first was ``Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis,'' published in 1684. This was his first paper in a scholarly journal, which is both less and more of a big deal than it sounds. It's not the case that Leibniz was an unknown testing the waters of scholarly fame, so in that way the paper was less of a big deal for him than it might seem at first blush. On the other hand, one reason that Leibniz was already well-known and greatly respected before he published any journal papers is that journals were a new phenomenon. A.E. was one of the four great general scholarly journals of its time, the last of the four to begin publication. More about that later, as I want to get the current tranche of entries out the door (I want to publish).

ae.
aetatis. Latin for `at [or of] the age of.'

A.E.
Albert Einstein.

[Old bushy-hair himself]

[column]

A.E.
Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936). Poet (``A Shropshire Lad''), classicist and put-down virtuoso. Never got a Ph.D., which I suppose isn't all that odd. More at Housman, A.E. Interestingly, the classicist Alfred Edward Taylor (1869-1945) also published with ``A.E.'' instead of a name. Fascinating, huh?

Like another A.E. -- Einstein -- Housman initially worked in the patent office when he could not get an academic position. If you're still reading at this point in the entry, then you may be interested in visiting the A.A.M. entry.

If you're not still reading this entry, then it's too bad, because you might have liked to have learned more about Housman's grave.

A&E
Arts and Entertainment. That at least is what ``A&E'' originally stood for. Googling on "Arts and Entertainment" brings up a deluxe ``A&E - The Arts and Entertainment Network'' top hit with a search bar for <aetv.com>, but the gloss appears to be Google's. ``Arts and Entertainment'' does not appear on the home page (or in its meta tags). Searching on ``arts'' at <aetv.com> on July 1, 2009, doesn't appear to bring up a single instance of the original expansion. (There were 283 hits; I didn't check them all. Excuse me.) I think A&E is now, so far as A&E itself is concerned, a sealed acronym. They would apparently prefer that people forget the original expansion. I think this is going to work even less well than Kentucky Fried Chicken's rebranding as KFC.

Early in the Twenty-First Century (we're talkin' programming for the ages, right?) A&E realized that (1) old people die, and (2) dead people do not participate in Nielsen sweeps (unless Nielsen subcontracts to ACORN or the Islamic Republic). So they decided to stave off destiny by going for younger viewers. They did this by going the crime-drama equivalent of ``reality'' programming: they replaced mystery programs with true-crime shows. And they dumped the good movies too. See the PBS entry for related thoughts on age and TV-watching.

The A&E Television Network includes not only the A&E cable channel but also bio. (they haven't suppressed the word biography, yet) and at least three History cable channels.

AE
Audio Editions. Books on cassette and CD.

A.E.
Nom de plume of George William Russel (1867-1935), a friend of Yeats, and himself an editor and poet, author of The Candle of Vision. The same is a character in Joyce's Ulysses. The illustration above is of a different, non-Irish writer.

ae
One. A term that finds its principal application in Scrabble®. It's accepted by the main tournament dictionaries: SOWPODS and TWL98. The OSPD4 says it's an adjective. This is quite accurate. It's modern Scottish, and the noun is ane. So there is no plural aes. I don't know how SOWPODS and TWL98 define it, but they don't accept aes either.

.ae
(Domain name code for) United Arab Emirates.

Here's the Federation of UAE Chambers of Commerce and Industry. The CIA Factbook has some basic information on the Emirates.

Oh, goodie: evidence that Outlook Express virus-propagation technology is also used in the emirates; I received good ol' W32/Sircam with an .ae-domain return address. Courtesy of Emirates Internet.

AE
Application Entity.

AE
(US) Armed Forces (in) Europe. ``Europe'' here is understood loosely, since it includes permanent installations (mostly in Europe) and contingent installations in the Middle East and Africa. Two-letter ``state'' code used by the MPSA and USPS. (For USPS purposes, US Armed Forces stationed out-of-country are served by ``domestic mail,'' and so require a ``state'' code.)

Mail bound for the AE region used to be (and I believe still is) routed through processing centers at New York City, and used to be nominally bound for New York. Using NY (for New York) instead of AE still works for mail, but will probably cause problems with credit-card verification, so go ahead and do it. See if I care. For more on MPSA/USPS military mail, see the MPO entry.

[column] AE has a lot of alternative expansions in Latin inscriptions too.

AEA
Alabama Education Association. Homepage reloads every second. Now children, what does that tell us? One of the state affiliates of the NEA.

AEA
American Electronics Association.

AEA
American Emu Association. ``Formed in 1989, AEA is a national, member driven, non-profit agricultural association dedicated to the emu industry. AEA promotes public awareness of emu products, fosters research and publishes a bi-monthly newsletter and several industry brochures.''

AEA
American Engineering Association. ``[A] national, non-profit professional association, dedicated to the enhancement of the engineering profession and US engineering capabilities.''

AEA
American Economic Association, founded 1885. A constituent society of the ACLS since 1919. ACLS has an overview, according to which, appropriately enough, payment of dues is the sole criterion for individual membership.

AEA
Arizona Education Association. One of the state affiliates of the NEA.

AEA
Atomic Energy Act. 1954 act of US congress that created the US AEC.

AEB
Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography. A journal. The cover is plain and matte, but it does feature the letters A, E, and B in a bouncy calligraphic style that makes them look like ``A & B.''

Catholic spirit that I am, I picked up a random issue (``New Series Volume 6 Numbers 3 & 4'' dated 1992, though copyrighted in 1994) and -- doing a bit of analytic bibliosomethingorother of my own -- looked at the table of contents. The authors of the first two items were Bernice W. Kliman and Robert F. Fleissner, respectively. What, you want to know the titles of their articles? Are you sure? Are you sure you don't want to just skip ahead to the next paragraph? The next entry altogether?

  1. Samuel Johnson, 1745 Annotator? Eighteenth-Century Editors, Anonymity, and The Shakespeare Wars.
  2. On Retaining M. Arden of Feversham: The Question of Titular Resonance.
Don't say I didn't warn you, even though I didn't really. Anyway, in an analytic sociobibliography comment that Abraham Lincoln once made, or that you can't definitively prove he didn't once make, ``For people who like that kind of book, that is the kind of book they will like.'' (I doubt he'd he have phrased it quite so inelegantly.)

Listed below those articles was a letter to the editor, and then a large number of items from men of the cloth. Errr, make that ``people of the cloth,'' and I don't mean seamsters and seamstresses. Starting with Rev. Carolyn D. Rude! I guess she's not Catholic. Twelve items in all, every one by a reverend. The question was not, where did they find all these holies? Rather, why didn't the laity contribute?

Well, I eventually figured it out, but I wanted to share my confusion first. The items were in a section titled ``Reviews.'' The articles at the top of the table of contents had titles followed by bylines (to stretch the sense of the term back to its original meaning) like ``By Bernice W. Kliman.'' The reviews list gave titles and no authors, followed by -- for example -- ``Rev. Iain Gordon Brown'' (of the National Library of Scotland, as the item reveals). This looked like a perfectly fine minister's name, and even a nice second career for a Scotsman and former prime minister, but the ``Rev.'' just meant ``reviewer'' or ``reviewed by.'' The explicit ``Rev.'' was there so the reader of the table of contents would not mistake the reviewer's name for the unlisted name of any author. To avoid confusion.

In the Reviews section there was also an article about (but evidently not a review of) reviews ``By'' an editor.

AEC
Acoustic Echo Canceler.

AEC
Architecture, Engineering and Construction. There's an AECNET sponsored by Environmental Dynamics Design, Inc.

AEC
(US) Atomic Energy Commission. Established by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (a/k/a the McMahon Act). The legislation created the initial framework for private industrial involvement in the development of nuclear power generation; the AEC was charged with administering and regulating atomic power production.

In 1948, the AEC authorized the construction of several research and test facilities, including a high-flux materials-testing reactor (MTR), an experimental fast breeder reactor (EBR-I), and a prototype pressurized-water reactor for submarine propulsion (STR, for submarine thermal reactor, later called S1W).

Many years later, the AEC was split into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA). The latter was absorbed into the Department of Energy (DoE) when that was created in 1977.

AECI
La Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional.

AECL
Atomic Energy of Canada, Limited. (EACL in French. What is it in Inuktitut?)

AECT
Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Within the NEA.

AED
Academy for Eating Disorders. Why would anyone want to eat a disorder?

AED
Academy for Educational Development.

AED
Atomic-Emission Detector.

AED
Automatic External Defibrillator. I hope that's CLEAR!

AEDC
Arnold Engineering Development Center.

AEDE
Asociación de Editores de Diarios Españoles. `Spanish Newspaper Publishers' Association.' Founded in 1978 to support press freedom (Generalisimo Francisco Franco died in 1975 and was still dead at that time). AEDE became a trade association in 2000. AEDE was in the news in 2014 when it successfully lobbied the Spanish parliament to require Google News to pay (unspecified, but nonrenounceable) royalties for the snippets of content accompanying links to news sources. The law is effective from January 2015. After Google announced that it would pull the plug on Google News Spain in December 2014, AEDE called for the government to stop Google from closing the offending site.

aedean, AEDEAN
Looks like an Irish Gaelic word, but it's actually an acronym for Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos. (Click here if that link doesn't work.) Aedean is a member of ESSE and also EAAS, but the emphasis is clearly with the former (i.e., on English philology).

AEDEI
Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses. I've read complaints by Irish people about the ignorance of South Americans (at least in Brazil and some Spanish-speaking countries). They will explain that they are irlandés (in Spanish; irlandês in Portuguese), and are often misheard as having said that they are holandés (or holandês). Sometimes repetition doesn't help. Evidently the Netherlands (population about 17 million; a Spanish possession during Spain's Golden Age and a commercial competitor of the Spanish and Portuguese empires afterwards) is better known than Ireland (population about 5 million).

AEDIE
Asociación Española para el Desarrollo de la Ingeniería Eléctrica. `Spanish Association for the Development of Electrical Engineering.'

AEEC
Asociación Española de Estudios Canadienses. `Spanish Association for Canadian Studies.'

AEEG
American Entrepreneurs for Economic Growth. A name that promises tendentiousness and special pleading, if anything ever did.

AEEM
Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics.

AEF
Advertising Educational Foundation. Is that really the point?

AEF
Aerospace Education Foundation. A ``non-profit educational charity promoting aerospace excellence.''

AEF
American Enuresis Foundation.

AEF
American Expeditionary Force. Contingent of American troops, informally called doughboys, sent to fight on Allied side in WWI. On July 4, 1917, Charles M. Stanton gave a speech at the tomb of Lafayette in Paris. He said, ``Lafayette, we are here.'' So were the British, as the BEF, and the Canadians (CEF). Why, it was a regular Boy Scout International Jamboree, but with a lower survival rate. See the U-boat entry for something about how we all happened to get together there.

If you just linked here from the Þe entry, you're probably wondering why.

AEF
Armenian Educational Foundation. ``Since 1950, the Armenian Educational Foundation, Inc. (AEF) has been a cornerstone of the Armenian educational movement around the world. It has lent a helping hand to hundreds of students and to dozens of schools in numerous nations. Through its many years of giving, it has proven to be one of the most enduring and productive organizations in the Diaspora.''

AEG
Association of Engineering Geologists.

AEGIS
Advanced Electronic Guidance and Instrumentation System.

A.E.H.
A.E. Housman, supra.

AEHA
(Japan) Association for Electric Home Appliances.

AEHA:NS
Allergy & Environmental Health Association: Nova Scotia.

They have pages at geocities.com dedicated to spreading the word about great dangers of natural gas. Thank you very much, I needed an excuse to leave that party.

AEI
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. ``Founded in 1943 and located in Washington, D.C., [it] is one of America's largest and most respected `think tanks'.'' Atlanticist, free-market, neoconservative.

AEI
Architectural Engineering Institute.

AEI
Automatic Equipment Identification.

A.E.I.O.U.
A cryptic initialism invented by Frederick III, ruler (duke, then archduke) of Austria (of the long Habsburg line) and Holy Roman Emperor from 1440 to 1493. It modestly encoded the immodest ambition of his dynasty. He had it engraved on public buildings and used the device with his signature. Subsequent Habsburg emperors continued the use. Fred was a bit of a mystic and obscurantist, and it's not certain what the expansion was supposed to be, or even if it was originally intended to have a single expansion, but all the common ones have a similar thrust:
  1. German: Alles Erdreich ist Österreich untertan.
    (`All earth is subject to Austria.')
  2. Latin: Austriae est imperare orbi universo.
    (`Austria is destined to rule the world.')
  3. Latin: Austria erit in orbe ultima.
    (`Austria will last forever.')
The translations are the typical ones into English. The two from Latin are a bit free. The one from German is fairly accurate; Erdreich has a sense of `soil,' but one somewhat etymological translation would be `earthly realm.' Three alternate expansions usually indicate severe backronymy.

Strictly speaking, the German version would give rise to the initialism A.E.I.Ö.U., but Ö is also written Oe.

AEM
Analytic Electron Microscop{e | y}. Catch-all term for any TEM-type microscope with any advanced feature, such as CBED, EELS or SAED. In other words, TEM that isn't merely CTEM.

AEOI
Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.

[column]

AEON
Ancient Etymology ONline.

AEP
American Electric Power Company.

AEP
AppleTalk Echo Protocol.

AEP
Arts Education Partnership. ``Partnership'' among over 100 US organizations seeking to promote arts education in schools.

AEP
Association of Emergency Physicians.

AEP
Association of European Psychiatrists.

AEPC
Association for European Paediatric Cardiology. French: Association Européenne pour la Cardiologie Pédiatrique.

AEPC
ASAS/ENSCE Process Cluster. (The acronyms stand for All [intelligence] Sources Analysis System and Enemy Situation Correlation Element.)

AER
American Economic Review.

AER
Annual Energy Review. Don't wait for the next one, look in MER!

AERA
American Educational Research Association. Holds its annual meeting in Spring.

AEROCE
AtmosphERe/Ocean Chemistry Experiment. Gosh, that seems A bIt Recherché.

aerial metal
Strong lightweight aluminum-lithium (Al-Li) alloy. Used for its low density: ~4 g/cc (~100 lbs per cu. ft.).

aeronaut
An obsolete word in the same lexical rubbish heap as aerostat (so I thought) and aerostation. Evident etymology: aero (combining form from the Greek meaning `air') + naut (from the Greek meaning `sailor,' derived in turn from the English nut, meaning `person who takes stupid risks').

aerosil
A silicon-based solid that is very translucent, and has a dielectric constant that is on the order of a percent or more, but not a lot, above unity. Material useful for, indeed specifically invented for, Cherenkov-counters.

The most striking feature of aerosil is its density -- it's much lighter than pumice. If you want to know what it feels like to hold a block of aerosil in your hot little hand, just bake an ordinary-size potato for eight hours at 450 °F.

aeroscopy
According to the encyclopedia and dictionary Pantologia (London, 1813), aeroscopy is ``[t]he observation of the air.''

Heck, no -- I ain't daydreaming! I'm engaging in aeroscopy!

aerostat
Here's the complete aerostat entry from the Pantologia (London, 1813):
AEROSTAT, the air balloon, is a name given to a new constellation situated between the feet of Capricorn. This constellation was proposed by M. Lalande, in 1798, when he had an interview with M. Borda, Dr. Zach, and other German astronomers, at Gotha, whither he was sent to convert them to the French calendar and measures: he did not obtain the object of his mission.

At least not immediately. We also have entries for balloon payment, balloon smuggler, and SI, but read on.

I used to think this was a quaint old word. See JLENS.

aerostation
Pantologia, an 1813 encyclopedia and dictionary, charmingly explains that aerostation
in its primary and proper sense, denotes the science of weights, suspended in the air [why doesn't MIT have a Department of Aerostation -- is it a social science?]; but in the modern application of the term, it signifies the art of navigating through the air, both in the principles and the practice of it. ...

The article on this important modern technology runs to unnumbered pages (little joke, actually almost eleven nonpaginated pages), covering the principles, the history, etc. As I write this in 2003, it seems appropriate to reproduce the review of the earliest history of flight R&D:

   History of Aerostation. Various schemes for rising in the air, and passing through it, have been devised and attempted, both by the ancients and moderns, and that upon different principles, and with various success. Of these, some attempts have been made upon mechanical principles, or by virtue of the powers of mechanism: and such are conceived to be the instances related of the flying pigeons made by Archytas, the flying eagle and fly by Regiomontanus, and various others. Again other projects have been formed for attaching wings to some parts of the body, which were to be moved either by the hands or feet, by the help of mechanical powers; so that striking the air with them, after the manner of the wings of a bird, the person might raise himself in the air, and transport himself through it, in imitation of that animal. The romances of almost every nation have recorded instances of persons being carried through the air, both by the agency of spirits and mechanical inventions; but till the time of the celebrated lord Bacon, no rational principle appears ever to have been thought of by which this might be accomplished. Friar Bacon indeed had written upon the subject; and many had supposed, that, by means of artificial wings, a man might fly as well as a bird: but these opinions were refuted by Borelli in his treatise De Motu Animalium, where, from comparison between the power of the muscles which move the wings of a bird, and those which move the arms of a man, he demonstrates that the latter are utterly insufficient to strike the air with such force as to raise him from the ground. In the year 1672, bishop Wilkins published his ``Discovery of the New World,'' in which he certainly seems to have conceived the idea of raising bodies into the atmosphere by filling them with rarefied air. This, however, he did not by any means pursue; but rested his hopes upon mechanical motions, to be accomplished by human strength, or by springs, &c. which have been proved incapable of answering any useful purpose. The jesuit Francis Lana, contemporary with bishop Wilkins, proposed to exhaust hollow balls of metal of their air, and by that means occasion them to ascend. But though the theory was unexceptionable, the means were certainly insufficient for the end: for a vessel of copper, made sufficiently thin to float in the atmosphere, would be utterly unable to resist the external pressure, which being demonstrated, no attempt was made upon that principle. ...

For an example of the use of this term in a modern language, see a CIA entry. Dang! Here's a site in English that uses the word (aerostation.org). Next thing you know, cavers will start calling themselves spelunkers.

AERS
Association of Educators in Radiological Sciences, Inc.

AES
Abrasive Engineering Society. Hey you! Yeah you. You call yourself an engineer? Hah! You're not fit to design my shoelaces. You think stress analysis is done by psychiatrists. You're a disgrace to your degree. I'd tell you to go jump in the lake, but you probably couldn't design yourself out of the house and down to the bridge all alone.

AES
Acrylonitrile Ethylene propylene Styrene [rubber]. A quaterpolymer plastic.

AES
Adlai E. Stevenson. AES III was the Democratic Party candidate for the US presidency in 1952 and 1956, losing both times to Republican candidate DDE. The ``Stevenson shoe'' (shoe with a hole worn into the sole) got its name from his footgear.

AES
American Endodontic Society.

AES
Application Environment { Standard | Service }.

AES
Atmospheric Environment Service (of Canada).

AES
Atomic Emission Spectroscopy. Equivalently, Optical same.

Here's some instructional material from Virginia Tech (VT).

AES
Audio Engineering Society. The 2001 AES Convention was in September.

AES
Auger Emission Spectroscopy. Electron emission by atoms near the surface. AES is energy analysis of these electrons to determine the chemical composition. The position-resolved version is called Scanning Auger Microscopy (SAM).

Vide Auger process.

Here's some instructional material from Virginia Tech (VT). Here's some from Charles Evans & Associates.

AES
Augmented Export Schema. Look here for explanation.

AES
Automated Export (reporting) System. Used by the US Customs Service and by the Foreign Trade Division (FTD) of the US Census Bureau. A voluntary program. Described in AESTIR documentation.

AES
Automotive Electronics Services. A retailer of electronic diagnostic equipment and services for automobile service technicians and also for back-yard goof-offs.

AESE
Association of Earth Science Editors.

AES/EBU
Audio Engineering Society (AES) / European Broadcast Union (EBU).

AESF
American Electroplaters and Surface Finishers Society, Inc.

AESLA
Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada. `Spanish Association for Applied Linguistics.' Affiliated with AILA.

AESS
Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society.

AEST
Australian Eastern Standard Time. Ten hours ahead of UTC.

Aestimatio
Aestimatio: Critical Reviews in the History of Science. ``Aestimatio provides critical, timely assessments of books published in the history of what was called science from antiquity up to the early modern period in cultures ranging from Spain to India, and from Africa to northern Europe. The aim is to allow reviewers the opportunity to engage critically both the results of research in the history of science and how these results are obtained.''

In Roman Law, aestimatio (or litis aestimatio) was an assessment of damages. Yeah, yeah, it had other meanings.

AESTIR
Automated Export System (AES) Trade Interface Requirements. Part of the technical documentation maintained by the US Customs Service.

[column]

aet.
Latin aetas, `age.' Often encountered in the titles of death notices, as in "Mary Corinne Rosebrook (aet. CVII)." The use of Latin confers a solemnity that delicately indicates age at the time of decease. (Yes, Corinne Rosebrook was 107; she died on January 11, 2001. She was an undergraduate at Ohio Wesleyan (OWU) when the Titanic went down.)

The word aetas arose by contraction from a form of the word aevum, `eternity.' A cognate word, aeternitas, was used to mean the same thing, aevum was more often used in the transformed sense of `age,' giving us medieval (middle age), primeval (first age) and coeval. The naturalness of the semantic shift is perhaps clearer in aevum's Greek cognate aiôn, our eon.

AET, aet
After Extra Time. AET, often in parenthesis and sometimes in lower case, is used to indicate final scores reached during ``extra time'' in ``football'' (soccer), the same way OT is used with final scores in basketball and football. (I don't know if announcers in any soccer-playing countries use an expression like ``in ee tee'' like the corresponding expression with OT.)

AETS
Anishinabek Employment and Training Services. The Anishinabek are, I think, an Ojibway First Nation in western Ontario.

AETS
Association for the Education of Teachers in Science. ``The mission of AETS is to promote leadership in, and support for those involved in, the professional development of teachers of science. AETS serves educators involved in the professional development of teachers of science, including science teacher educators, staff developers, college-level science instructors, education policy makers, instructional material developers, science supervisors/specialists/coordinators, lead/mentor teachers, and all others interested in promoting the development of teachers of science.''

AEUB
Alberta Energy and Utilities Board.

AEW
Airborne Early Warning. (NATO acronym.)

A&F
Abercrombie and Fitch. An amazingly successful brand of undistinguished casual wear for the young and the young-at-brain. But fashion is fickle.

Afghanistan flag

.af
(Domain name code for) Afghanistan. The US government's Country Studies website has a page of links (``Afghanistan Country Studies'') amounting to the online version of its Afghanistan book.

Scarecrow Press, Inc., of Lanham, Md. and London, publishes a number of historical dictionaries, mostly one per (relatively noticeable) nation, including The Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan (2/e, 1997) by Ludwig W. Adamec, which runs xiii+500 pp. In 1996, Scarecrow inaugurated a new series of Historical Dictionaries of War, Revolution, and Civil Unrest. First in the series was Afghanistan. The (series) Editor's Preface begins ``[i]t is indeed appropriate.'' The Dictionary of Afghan Wars, Revolutions, and Insurgencies, also by Ludwig W. Adamec runs xvii+365 pp.

Arnold J. Toynbee spent a third of the year 1960 between Oxus and Jumna. The last four words are the title of a book he wrote about the trip, subtitled ``A journey in India Pakistan and Afghanistan.'' (Punctuation sic, and in a way most appropriate.) (Oxus is the ancient name of one of the longest rivers in Central Asia, from Oxos in Greek. The name was used throughout Europe for a couple of thousand years or so, but recently it has become common to refer to it by a local name -- Amu Darya or Amudarya. The river forms much of the northern border of Afghanistan. The Jumna lies south and east of the Indus.)

Arnold Toynbee was a widely (I didn't say universally) respected historian, so this book was something of a teaching opportunity. In ch. 1, ``The Old World's Eastern Roundabout,'' he divides the world up into culs-de-sac and roundabouts. ``In the fifteenth century the Portuguese invented a new kind of sailing ship that could keep the sea continuously for months on end.'' This, he says, temporarily turned Europe from a cul-de-sac into the world's central roundabout and ``temporarily put both Afghanistan and Syria [the previously dominant roundabouts, in his telling] out of business.'' Toynbee judged that more recent inventions -- ``mechanized rail and road vehicles, followed up by aircraft... have been deposing Western Europe from her temporary ascendancy in the World and have been reinstating Syria and Afghanistan.'' (``Syria'' here means greater Syria, including Lebanon.)

He noticed somewhat mildly that ``disputes over political frontiers'' were holding back this progress, yet ``[a]ll the same, Beirut is already one of the World's most important international airports, and Qandahar is making a bid to become another of them.'' Toynbee described various infrastructure projects (roads, railroads, river ports, mountain tunnels) that the Russians and Americans were building in Afghanistan.

On p. 4: ``These new roads promise to reinstate Afghanistan in her traditional position in the World. They are her economic bonus from the present political competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. The bonus is valuable, but the accompanying risk is high. Roundabouts are strategic as well as economic assets, and strategic assets are tempting political prizes.''

Around page 103, he is again describing various projects that the Soviet Union had undertaken, some already completed, to improve the movement of freight into and out of Afghanistan. If successful, these would have the effect of reorienting Afghanistan's traffic to the Oxus.

    This will not be the first time that the navigation of the Oxus has been one of the determining factors in world history. In the second century B.C. the Water Sakas--Iranian forerunners of the Cossacks--applied the boatmanship which they had learnt on the Oxus to the navigation of the Helmand and the Indus. Like the Cossacks in a later age, the Sakas made their conquests by boat as well as on horseback. The present-day Russian navigators of the Oxus are most unlikely to try to use their command of the river, Cossack-fashion, for making conquests of the old-fashioned military kind.

Strictly speaking, perhaps this was technically correct, but he continues...

They will try, not to dominate Afghanistan by force of arms, but to attract her as a sun-flower is attracted by the Sun. Evidently the Russians have every right to do this if they can. And, of course, Pakistan and the Western World have an equal right to compete with the Soviet Union for Afghanistan's custom by making the Karachi trade-route more attractive for the Afghans than it is at present. If one chooses, one may call this economic competition `the Cold War'. But giving it a bad name will not make it a bad thing.

I don't entirely condemn Toynbee for failing to see a couple of decades into the future. No one can do so reliably, though some possibilities can be reliably discarded from consideration. But it is not just ``with the benefit of hindsight'' that we see Toynbee as misguided; a limited historical horizon helps us miss what he could see. In May 2010, Foreign Policy magazine published a bittersweet recollection by Mohammad Qayoumi, a photo essay online here.

Given the images people see on TV and the headlines written about Afghanistan over the past three decades of war, many conclude the country never made it out of the Middle Ages. ... But that is not the Afghanistan I remember. I grew up in Kabul in the 1950s and '60s. When I was in middle school, I remember that on one visit to a city market, I bought a photobook about the country published by Afghanistan's planning ministry. Most of the images dated from the 1950s. I had largely forgotten about that book until recently; I left Afghanistan in 1968... Through a colleague, I received a copy of the book and recognized it as a time capsule of the Afghanistan I had once known -- perhaps a little airbrushed by government officials, but a far more realistic picture of my homeland than one often sees today.

A half-century ago, Afghan women pursued careers in medicine; men and women mingled casually at movie theaters and university campuses in Kabul; factories in the suburbs churned out textiles and other goods. There was a tradition of law and order, and a government capable of undertaking large national infrastructure projects, like building hydropower stations and roads, albeit with outside help. Ordinary people had a sense of hope, a belief that education could open opportunities for all, a conviction that a bright future lay ahead. All that has been destroyed by three decades of war, but it was real.

Back to Toynbee's book. The then-septuagenarian covered a lot of ground, and modernizing cities were a small part of it. The following concerns a Pakhtun tribal area in Pakistan, but Toynbee's observations there are relevant to Afghanistan. The famous Khyber Pass straddles the Afghan-Pakistan border. Its summit is at Landi Kotal, about 3 miles inside Pakistan. The nearest large city is Peshawar, the provincial capital, roughly 30 miles from Landi Kotal.

P. 17: ``...we happened to approach the Landi Kotal railway station at the moment when the weekly train was disgorging a horde of passengers. As they streamed westward, I thought they must be on pilgrimage, but their business was mundane. They were bound for Landi Kotal market-place, where Russian teapots, German wireless-sets, and Indian gauzes can be bought at prices which make the rail or bus fare from Peshawar worth paying. The Pakistan Government loses some customs revenue, but it turns a blind eye, and this is surely politic. The highland tribesmen cannot live off the crops from their pitiful little stony fields--at least, not unless they plant the fields illicitly with the opium poppy. Forbid poppy-cultivation, forbid the contraband trade, and you will drive a starving people into falling back on their traditional way of earning a living. And the old rhythm of raids alternating with punitive expeditions is not one that either party wishes to revive.'' (Personally, I imagine that duties went uncollected more as a result of corruption than of the central government's enlightened neglect.)

AF
Air Force. Productive acronym suffix, as in RAF of Great Britain and USAF.

AF
Air Frame.

A/F, AF
Air-Fuel, Air-to-Fuel. In fact, the collocations ``Air Fuel'' and ``Air-to-Fuel'' occur most frequently in the phrases for the ratio, so AF is often a synonym for AF ratio. Tastes, or degrees of punctiliousness, vary. I'm about to bore you terribly, so before I drive you away I should say: cf. AV.

In all cases I have seen, the ratio is a mass ratio. In fact, there's even something called the ``volumetric efficiency'' for internal combustion engines, which also tends to be thought of as a mass ratio. Aeronautical engineers sometimes define the AF ratio as a mass ratio, but other mechanical engineers, particularly those who deal with land vehicles, describe it as a ``weight ratio.'' That's quite accurate enough, and it has the benefit of a dedicated adjective (see AFR), though weight as such is usually a little beside the point.

I suppose it's a niggling point, but it's irritating to a physicist. The mass is a measure of the amount of a substance, while the weight is a measure of the gravitational force it exerts. The mass-to-measured-weight conversion factor (the acceleration of gravity g) depends on altitude and deviations from a spherically symmetric earth, and has Coriolis and centrifugal force components. (Weight also depends on velocity and the space-time curvature tensor, if you want to get relativistic). These corrections are tiny at the level of precision relevant to combustion engines, and since the fuel and air are in the same place, most of the variation of g cancels, and weight ratios and mass ratios are equivalent. So it's ``academic,'' but when it costs nothing to state precisely rather than imply what one means, in technical usage one should be pedantic, errr, precise.

As long as we're being inappropriately precise, it's equally inappropriate to mention that mass is probably not the ideal measure of quantity, since the fuel and air often enter the combustion chamber at different temperatures. Raising the temperature increases the energy and thus the mass (E = mc2, remember?). Distinguishing mass and weight doesn't help here: the thermal-energy mass and the matter mass obey the same equivalence principle, and contribute in the same proportion to weight. (The necessary correction is on the order of a part in 1020.) The chemists are wise to use moles.

AF
Anglo-French. In politics, history, and just about anything other than linguistics, this term characterizes whatever is jointly English (or British, or UK) and French. In linguistics it is essentially the version of Old French spoken in Norman England. The Norman conquest of Great Britain had enormous direct effects on the Germanic languages spoken there, of course, particularly the infusion of French and more Latinate vocabulary and inflections. In addition, there were indirect effects from the demotion of English to a peasant language, when the nobility and royal court spoke and made law in French. The Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, a date that was once universally recognizable to English-speakers. Language changes usually take time and cannot be so sharply dated, but for practical purposes the periodization of English takes Old English to 1100, and Middle English from there.

AF
Armed Forces.

The story goes that Victor Mature and Jim Backus were at work in the Paramount Studio one day when Mature had to run an errand. Backus went along, and as they were in a hurry they skipped lunch and substituted a quick drink (not a hardship). Also to save time, they didn't bother changing out of their costumes for the sword-and-sandals flick they were working on. So they walked into an Encino bar as Roman warriors, in tufted helmets, shiny breastplates, and knee-length skirts, and ordered two highballs. The bartender didn't move, just stared. After a long pause, Mature demanded ``What's the matter with you? Don't you serve members of the Armed Forces?''

In fact, Victor Mature (1915-99) was a petty officer in the Coast Guard during WWII, serving on the Admiral Mayo, a troop transport.

I first read this story in Buskin' with H. Allen Smith, which isn't necessarily accurate. One of my first thoughts was ``Jim Backus -- the voice of Mr. Magoo? Thurston Howell the third on Gilligan's Island? You've gotta be kidding! He could be maybe a centurion. Centurions can be soft and slow.'' Sure enough, it seems the only ancient Roman he ever played in the movies was a centurion in Androcles and the Lion (1952). Victor Mature had a starring role in that, as a captain.

Androcles, played by Alan Young, only got third billing. Look, everyone knows this old story, so you have to add stuff -- flesh it out, so to speak. First billing went to luscious Jean Simmons, in the role of Lavinia. Oh! This was an adaptation of GBS's play ``Androcles and the Lion.'' A comedy. Harpo Marx was originally supposed to play Androcles, but he was eventually replaced by Young. The only other film role Harpo ever played after this was Sir Isaac Newton in The Story of Mankind (1957). Groucho and Chico were in it too, but it wasn't a comedy. It was a drama with a sci-fi frame narrative! Apparently one of the great all-time star-studded clunkers. Now where were we? Alan Young, the Androcles part? Alan Young later went on to direct the TV comedy Mr. Ed (1961-66). He also starred (co-starred?) as Mr. Ed's owner Wilbur Post.

As you may have guessed, there's an animal in ``Androcles and the Lion'' too. In the movie production the guy in the lion suit was Woody Strode, who sounds like someone I should mention in the nomen est omen entry. I don't know about you, but when I think of guys in lion suits I think of Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939). The Wicked Witch of the West in that movie was played by Margaret Hamilton, who before she went into film acting was a kindergarten teacher. In that role she threw out rambunctious little William Windom, age five, who later went on to a successful acting career of his own. That seems kind of harsh. I didn't know you could get thrown out of kindergarten, my little pretty one. Another of Margaret Hamilton's students was Jim Backus. Ah, good, we're coming back around again.

Jim Backus (1913-1989) and Victor Mature (1915-1999) both attended Kentucky Military Academy, and Backus's first movie role was in Easy Living (1949), which starred Mature. The two were good friends who shared a love of golf and evidently didn't take themselves too seriously. Victor Mature was a major star from the end of WWII to the end of the 1950's, when he let Charlton Heston have the Biblical Hero franchise and focused on golf instead. Mature didn't get much respect from critics. (I'm not saying he deserved more respect, mind you -- this wasn't exactly high art.) According to a widely repeated story, when he applied to join an exclusive Los Angeles Country Club at the height of his career, he was turned down and told that actors were not accepted as members. His famous retort was: ``I'm not an actor -- and I've got 67 films to prove it!'' (The number varies in different tellings.) So it seems he had a sense of humor too. This Encino-bar story looks plausible.

We're not likely to have a Victor Mature entry, so this is probably the place to mention that his dad's name was Marcello Gelindo Maturi. (You were probably wondering about the origin of the name.)

Back in the early 1980's, there was a problem in Germany of restaurants refusing to serve Americans. Someone I knew actually experienced this first-hand. I mention it in this entry because it seemed to be a policy directed against American servicemen in Germany. The US and German governments at the time cooperated in ending the practice. My Uncle Fritz, who'd been a lawyer in Germany before becoming a lawyer in the US, pointed out to me that the restaurants didn't have the legal right to select customers. I guess it's one of those quirks of Roman code, where (roughly) things not expressly allowed are forbidden, rather than vice versa.

AF
Arthritis Foundation.

AF
Atrial Fibrillation. Former President Bush says he's got it. Atrial fibrillation isn't as bad as ventricular fibrillation (VF, q.v.), because the atria are basically just holding tanks for the ventricles, which do the heart's heavy lifting (pumping blood into the arteries).

Well, whatever it is, at least it's more decorous than the overly publicized medical disorder of the subsequent defeated Republican presidential candidate. (That was ED, in case you forgot. If you're going to make up a euphemistic acronym, make it up for something that needs it. Then again, there's the example of B.O.)

AF
Audio-Forum. ``[O]ne of the largest publishers and distributors of self-instructional, personal development, and educational audiovisual materials in the United States.'' Yet I don't even know they exist! ``We've been in business since 1972, providing quality programs to both individual consumers and educational institutions throughout the United States and the world.''

AF
Audio Frequency. Nominally from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. The young and those who have lived all their lives in a pre-modern society can sometimes hear to the upper end of that range. ``Sounds'' at the lower end of the range are not very audible, but they may be perceived (a) as felt vibration and (b) through their higher harmonics (in effect: through the deviations from purely sinusoidal form of the vibrations).

AF
Axle to Frame. Truck dimension: precisely, the horizontal distance from the center of the rear axle or axles to the end of the frame.

For more, see Chassis Dimensions in the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.

AFA
Adoptive Families of America.

AFA
Air Force Acadaemy. See USAFA.

AFA
Air Force Association. ``The Air Force Association is a grass-roots, non-profit aerospace organization whose objective is to promote greater understanding of aerospace and national defense issues.''

AFA
American Forensics Association . See our other debating entries.

AFA
American Forestry Association.

AFA
Asociación Física Argentina.

AFA
Association of Flight Attendants.

AFA
The American Foundation of Audiology.

AFAHK
As Far As He { Knows | Knew }. On the pattern of AFAIK.

AFAIK, afaik
As Far As I Know.

Much less common approximate synonyms: TTBOMKAB, TTBOMKAU.
With similar meanings: TTBOMM, AIUI.
Expressing a greater certainty (with subjectivity not explicit): AAMOF.

What is this, a thesaurus?

I suppose that, on the pattern of AFAHK, AFAIK ought to mean As Far As It { Knows | Knew }.

AFAIR
As Far As I Recall. Modeled on AFAIK so the acronym will be recognized (in speech people tend to use ``can recall'').

AFASK
<Alt.Fan.Authors.Stephen-King>. I don't have to tell you that newsgroups are normally written all lower-case, do I?

AFASK
As Far As She { Knows | Knew }. On the pattern of AFAIK.

AFB
Air Force Base. Some national (US) research laboratories are sited within USAF bases. One of those, not surprisingly, is AFRL; it's located at Wright-Patterson AFB. Sandia Labs was founded in New Mexico as part of the Manhattan Engineering District, but is now operated by Lockheed Martin for the is operated by the Department of Energy; it's located within Kirtland AFB.

Oh, I suppose air force bases may have some other purposes besides hosting basic-science research laboratories. I'll have to look into that.

AFB
American Foundation for the Blind.

AFBI
American Family Business Institute.

AFBOI
Association Francophone Belge de l'Ostéogenèse Imparfaite.

AFC
Alkaline Fuel Cell. Fuel cell using aqueous potassium hydroxide as the electrolyte.

AFC's have been used in NASA manned missions since around 1965, supplying electrical power for Gemini, Apollo, and space-shuttle astronauts. They react oxygen and hydrogen, and the oxygen tanks double as sources of oxygen for breathable air. (Before the Apollo 1 test disaster, the plan had been to use a pure oxygen atmosphere. After, this was changed to a 60-40 oxygen-nitrogen mix at 5 psi.) Because the fuel cells are not efficient, they generate waste heat; this has been used for heating the inhabited portions of the spacecraft.

The material byproduct of combustion, of course, is water, and on manned missions the fuel-cell exhaust is the principal source of water for drinking, rehydrating food, and operating the toilet. When the water is released into the vacuum of space, its expansion cools it. This effect has been harnessed to cool spacecraft electronics.

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AFC
American Football Conference. One of two subdivisions of the NFL.

As Tennyson wrote --

Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.

AFC
Asociación de Fútbol de Cuba. One of forty national organizations in CONCACAF.

AFC
Association Française pour la Contraception. Cf. Condom.

AFC
Automatic Frequency Control. Periodic sampling of FM signal to keep receiver detecting in the center of the transmission band. Also called Automatic Fine Tuning (AFT). Note that audio signal of TV is FM-encoded in most (all?) major protocols.

AFCA
Air Force Communications Agency.

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AFCA
American Football Coaches Association.

AFCAC
Air Force Computer Acquisition Center.

AFCEA
Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

AFCENT
Allied (NATO) Forces CENTral Europe.

AFCR
American Federation for Clinical Research. Now the AFMR.

AFD
Association Française des Diabétiques.

AFD
Atomic Flux Divergence. By the continuity equation, a negative flux divergence causes local accumulation, and a positive value of the flux divergence causes local decrease in particle count or density.

Electromigration causes atomic flux in solids, with local accumulation causing ``hillock'' growth since the solid density does not increase. (If a cap or cladding layer is used to prevent hillock formation, mechanical stress counteracts the electric field gradient to cancel the AFD, with a slight increase in density (solids are not very compressible.) A positive AFD from electromigration causes voiding, and this is an important failure mechanism in microelectronic devices.

Electric field in a metal is divergenceless (div E = 0), and the atomic flux, viz. atomic current density, is proportional to the electric field. Therefore, in a homogeneous material, electromigration does not lead to flux divergence. However, any inhomogeneity in material composition or temperature affects the proportionality constant relating atomic flux and electric field. Thus, wherever material or temperature varies along the electric field direction, voids or hillocks may form.

One of the most common misunderstandings about electromigration concerns the kind of atomic flux that can give rise to hillock or void growth, and it has to do with the word divergence. I've been kind of out of that field for years, and it's not a great draw for research funding, but there are fundamental things about electromigration that bug me, so I'll probably write more about this someday.

AFDC
Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The main federal program, jointly administered with and partly funded by the states, constituted (with food stamps, Medicaid, home relief, and some others) what was popularly thought of as ``welfare.'' In 1996 AFDC was replaced by block grants under the PRA. As of 2005, the program was called ``Temporary Assistance for Needy Families'' (TANF).

AFDC-CC
AFDC Child Care. A program providing child care to AFDC families with the head-of-household in a state-approved education or training program or working. If the work starts to come into enough money to end AFDC eligibility, there's some get-you-on-your-way help in the form of TCC, q.v..

AFE
Americans For the Environment. Americans who have volunteered to be mulched. But not yet. First, like nihilists, they must proselytize. And besides, in war it is not as good to die for one's side as it is to induce or cause some other guys to die for their side.

Pretty soon, there'll be a line you can sign on your driver's license, agreeing that whatever is left after your transplantable organs are harvested can be mulched, so long as this is done in a manner that respects the dignity of the body parts that haven't somehow become detached yet.

I guess you can tell I haven't done the reading on this one, huh? My cat was sick, my grandmother died! No, the other grandmother. Yes I have three grandmothers... um, it's a bit complicated. Yes, all passed away now. I don't know why they always die when I have tests -- come onnn, gimme partial credit at least!

It's a tropical rain forest out there!

AFE
AntiFerroElectric.

AFEA, AFEA/FAAS
Association Française d'Études Américaines. (`French Association for American Studies,' also abbreviated FAAS.) A constituent association of the EAAS. AFEA publishes RFEA.

AFER
AFrican Ecclesial Review. A publication of the AMECEA Pastoral Institute (Gaba). ``AFER is not the official voice of AMECEA (Association of Member Episcopal Conferences of Eastern Africa), except when this is clearly stated.''

AIDS isn't quite the massive problem in eastern Africa that it is further south. It's a great relief to be able to pick up an issue and not be faced with that horror all the time. For example, the December 2003 issue of AFER was dedicated to the ``War of Terror in Northern Uganda.'' More at LRA.

AFER
Association Française d'Épargne et de Retraite. `French Association for Savings and Retirement.'

aff.
Latin affinis, `having affinity to.' Used in taxonomy. Taxonomy is the acrimonious branch of biology.

AFFA
Department of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry - Australia. The former Department of Primary Industries and Energy (PIE).

aff'd
AFFirmeD. The higher court upholds a lower court's decision. Such an upbeat term in such a contentious field.

Affirmed was also the name of a great racehorse.

AFFI
American Frozen Food Institute. For an opposing opinion, visit the Canned Vegetable Council. (``The Canned Vegetable Council was founded over twenty years ago to provide factual information about vegetables in cans.'' Surprise conclusion: canned veggies taste good and are good for you.)

What do I look like, I potted plant?

``Affirmative, Captain.''
Of course, you illogical waste of protoplasm! Oh, man, talk about human anti-Vulcanism. I've heard them talk -- ``half-breed,'' they call me. They think just because I maintain the dignity of my noble composure, that I have no feelings. I know Kirk photon-torpedoes all my promotion requests because this ship would fall apart without me. I'll one-big-happy-crew him when I finally get my own command. The man couldn't be more full of it if they beamed the head contents into his cabin. And he probably couldn't tell that stuff from mess rations anyway. I sure can't. Oh ... for the brassberryant fire-tarts of home!

``Hmmm, fascinating sir.'' The words of that old plastic face ring so true -- Both sides was against me since the day I was born.

Affordable Luxury
  1. cheap knock-off
  2. tagline in Daewoo advertising campaign

AFGE
American Federation of Government Employees.

AFHU
American Friends of The Hebrew University.

AFHV
``America's Funniest Home Videos.'' A television program showcasing spontaneous and candid moments carefully staged by amateurs, and videos of children and cute pets doing the darndest things already, dammit! Now the official abbreviation is AFV.

AFI
Air Force Instruction. I.e., a rule. Cf. command.

AFI
American Film Institute.

AFI
Authority and Format Identifier.

AFIP
(US) Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

This reminds me of the famous fight between Sugar Ray Robinson and Jimmy Doyle, in June 1947. Specifically, of something Robinson said after the fight. (I'm not sure of the exact words, and all I have to go on right now are a dozen different versions in recent newspaper stories. I'll try to run this down later.)

It was Robinson's first defense of his welterweight title. Doyle had suffered a severe concussion in a match with Artie Levine 15 months earlier, and the night before his match with Doyle, Robinson dreamt that he killed Doyle with a single left hook in the eighth round. The next morning, Robinson tried to back out or postpone the match, and only agreed to go ahead after the promoters brought in the priest from Doyle's parish, who somehow reassured him.

Robinson's left hook knocked Doyle out in the eighth round, though he was ``saved by the bell,'' which rang at the count of nine. Doyle didn't answer the bell for the next round. In fact, he was carried from his corner on a stretcher, and he died the next day. Testifying at the inquest, Robinson was asked ``... you must have known Mr. Doyle was in trouble -- why did you go on hitting him?'' Robinson replied: ``Mister, it's my business to put people in trouble.''

``Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) is a tri-service agency of the Department of Defense with a threefold mission of consultation, education and research.'' Whoa! Three services and three missions!

AFIPS
American Federation of Information Processing Societies.

AFIRE
Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate. ``AFIRE members have a common interest in preserving and promoting cross-border investment in real estate. Founded in 1988 AFIRE currently has more than 180 members representing 21 countries.''

The AFIRE website has a graphic labeled ``Foreign Data: 2008 AFIRE Annual Survey (that was apparently done in some kind of collaboration with the Wisconsin School of Business and the James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate) that shows three years' results of some polling on the country ``providing the most stable and secure real estate investments.'' The US received by far the highest percentage of members' votes: 64% in 2006 falling to 53% in 2008 (eyeballing from the graph). Germany and Switzerland rose to about 11% for 2008. I'm not sure how meaningful this is, except to me (not very much at all). I only give the information to help you sort out what they mean by ``foreign investors.'' It helps to recognize (from a use of ``cross-border'' that apparently includes ``overseas'') that AFIRE is guilty of more than one linguistic infelicity.

I imagine that this association of investors in foreign real estate decided that ``AFIRE'' just sounded hotter than ``AIFRE'' (in English, anyway). Did it really not occur to them that it is not a positive thing to associate real estate with fire?

It's an interesting thought, though, that investors rather than real estate should be regarded as foreign. After all, the real estate usually stays put, and it's domestic where it is. (Yeah, I've visited Lake Havasu City's London Bridge.)

AFIS
American Forces Information Service.

AFIT
(US) Air Force Institute of Technology. Campus at WPAFB.

AFJ
Atheists For Jesus. ``A Site designed to provide a method of communication between religious and non-religious people who believe in the message of love and kindness put forth by Jesus.''

What good is love if you're not saved, eh? Makes being a non-atheistic Christian seem kind of selfish.

AFJ
April Fool's Joke. The entity described in the preceding entry was not one, AFAIK.

AFJP, A.F.J.P.
Administradoras de Fondos de Jubilaciones y Pensiones. Spanish, `administrators of pension and retirement funds.' An official Argentine-government designation for the commercial associations that administer retirement and pension funds under the terms of the S.I.J.P. Notice that the feminine plural administradoras is used. Normally in Spanish, mixed-gender plurals ``resolve'' (that's the standard linguistic term) toward the male plural (administradores, in this instance), but here the individual administrators are all S.A.'s (anonymous societies) and grammatically female.

The government entity that monitors AFJP's is the SAFJP.

AFK
Away From Keyboard. Cf. BAK, PEBCAK, PIFOK.

AfK
Archiv für Kulturgeschichte. A German journal that might have been named `Archives of Cultural History' in English. See if Stuart Jenks's page of Tables of Contents of Historical Journals and Monographic Series in German has a link for this yet (deutsche Seite: Zeitschriftenfreihandmagazin Inhaltsverzeichnisse geschichtswissenschaftlicher Zeitschriften in deutscher Sprache).

AFL
American Federation of Labor. A federation that was created in 1886 by national craft unions out of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada.

In 1935, the CIO was formed behind the leadership of UMW head John L. Lewis, who stormed out of the AFL. The AFL and CIO were merged as the AFL-CIO in December 1955.

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AFL
American Football League. Short-lived competitor to the NFL, absorbed into NFL as the American Football Conference (AFC), which included a few teams transferred from the originally larger NFL.

AFL
Arabic as a Foreign Language.

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AFL
Arena Football League. A professional indoor league of American football, complete with its own minor league, AF2.

Founded in 1987, its attendance reached an average of over 12,400 in 2005. It has had an NBC broadcast contract since 2003, when it moved the beginning of the season from May to February and switched to playing on Sundays.

AFLAC
Apologies For Lack of Audi Content. An alternative to OT preferred (by some) in electronic discussion forums for Audi automobiles.

The abbreviation is also used by a protesting duck in some television commercials that are, of course, not about Audi.

AFL-CIO
American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations. See AFL.

AFLP
Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism.

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AFLWA
Arena Football League Writers Association.

AFM
Adobe Font Metrics, Adobe Font Manager.

AFM
Air Force Manual.

AFM
American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada. A member union of the AFL-CIO and the CLC-CTC. Established in 1896, representing musicians of all genres. For $20+, they offer something that could be really useful: a video on how to get paying gigs.

AFM
AntiFerroMagnetism.

AFM
Association Française contre les Myopathies.

AFM
Atomic Force Microscop{e|y}. (AKA SFM.) One mode of operation of essentially the same apparatus as an STM. In AFM mode, a sharp probe tip is scanned across a surface, with three piezoelectric ceramics being used to control position in three dimensions. The two lateral (in-plane) positions are raster scanned, the vertical dimension is controlled by a feedback circuit that maintains constant force. The image produced is a topograph showing surface height as a function of position in the plane. AFM is the imaging mode of choice for an insulating surface, since in that case tunneling currents are small. However, since the force depends on the material below the tip, the height of the tip does not exactly track the surface of an inhomogeneous material.

The University of Michigan Electron Microbeam Analysis Laboratory has put a description of their AFM online.

Cf. other types of scanning-probe microscopy (SPM).

AFMA
American Film Market, um, Association?

AFMA
American Furniture Manufacturers Association.

AFMDA
American Friends of Magen David Adom

AFMLS
Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section, US Department of Justice.

AFMR
American Federation for Medical Research. (Formerly the AFCR.)

AFMR
AntiFerroMagnetic Resonance.

AFN
American Forces Network. See AFRTS.

AFN
American Forensic Nurses. They seem to be mostly about investigating sexual assault.

AFNOR
Assoc. Française de NORmalisation.

AFNORTH
Allied (NATO) Forces NORTHern Europe.

AFOSR
Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The Air Force OXR.

AFP
Administradora de Fondos de Pensiones.

AFP, A.F.P.
Agence France-Presse. I don't know what this means, as it's written in a number of foreign languages. AFP is an EANA member.

Oh, here's something from It Happened in Manhattan, by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer. It's subtitled ``An oral history of life in the city during the mid-twentieth century''; I'd have recommended ``A collection of recollections.'' Hilton Kramer's recollections begin on page 37. In page 39 and the fall of '52, he landed a job ``on the night shift of the New York bureau of the Agence France Press [sic], the big French news agency in the AP Building at Rockefeller Center.'' The next year he started reviewing exhibitions for the fortnightly Art Digest, which later became Arts Magazine. He continues:

It became very convenient to be working on the night shift for the Agence France. I could see the exhibitions during the day and, since nothing ever went on in that office at night anyway, write my reviews at night. French journalists were lazy beyond imagining. They got what they needed out of the New York Times or the Herald Tribune. The only times I actually had to send anything to Paris on the teletype machine was when the sports editor was too drunk to send the scores.
I was supposed to work from four to midnight but it was French hours. One night I wandered in at six, and the general manager, whom I'd always heard spoken of but had never seen, and whom the French didn't regard as French because he was from Alsace, was there. The place was in an uproar. What happened? It was the day Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe.

I've read a similar stories of foreign newsgathering in WWII consisting of translating the major local papers, though if the home office doesn't seem to want anything more in-depth -- which why would it? after all -- you might feel foolish working any harder. The French have a reputation for laziness, and I suppose there must be something to explain it, but the French co-workers I've had never exhibited the phenomenon, and if the French economy doesn't collapse before you read this, I'll argue that the French can't be doing anything too far wrong. It might be the work-smarter-not-harder thing. At least compared to the fabled Japanese salaryman, they may be getting drunk after work rather than staying late and getting drunk on the job. Gertrude Stein wrote somewhere that during WWI, the different work styles of French and American workers in railcar repair yards led to conflict, which was eventually resolved by having different nationalities work different shifts. She seemed to think that the different groups were equally effective, though I wonder how she would have known.

I was a bit puzzled about Hilton Kramer's mention of sports reporting. What US scores would be of interest to what readers of French news media? The only explanations of the comment, that I can think of, involve an American over-estimation of the interest generated by American sports in France. For support, perhaps, I can adduce the experience of Gilles in the ND entry.

AFP
AppleTalk Filing Protocol.

AFP, A.F.P.
Associated Foreign Press. This somewhat absurd acronym expansion is unusually informative because it tells something about the competence and credulity of the reporter who uses it. If you google on "Associated Foreign Press," you get (as of April 2012) about 80,000 ghits. Pride of first place goes to the AFP.com website, home of Agence France-Presse, but that's just Google being helpful; AFP knows its own expansion. Many ghits are for other webpages that also include ``AFP'' but not the bogus expansion. That's just Google being unhelpful. Some hits are for blog posts that somehow manage to include the phrase ``associated foreign press.''

So it's hard to tell just how widespread the error is, but the error is widespread: Many websites do give ``Associated Foreign Press'' as the expansion of the well-known AFP. Often, these are sites dedicated to passing along news on a regular basis, using writers who can't be bothered to do more than fatuously guess at the expansion of AFP.

AFP
Australian Federal Police.

AF&PA
American Forest & Paper Association. ``The national trade association of the forest, paper, and wood products industry, representing member companies engaged in growing, harvesting, and processing wood and wood fiber, manufacturing pulp, paper, and paperboard products from both virgin and recycled fiber, and producing engineered and traditional wood products. AF&PA represents a segment of industry which accounts for over 8% of the total U.S. manufacturing output.''

AFPA
Association of Family Practice Administrators.

AFPC
Association of Faculties of Pharmacy in Canada. It's ``the national non-profit organization advocating the interests of pharmacy education and educators in Canada

AFPS
Automatic Facility Protection Switching.

AFP Test
Alpha-FetoProtein Test. Blood test for evaluating fetal development.

AFQT
Armed Forces Qualification Test. Four tests of the ASVAB.

AFR
Air Force Regulation.

AFR
Air-Fuel Ratio. The ratio of air to fuel intake rates for a combustion engine. Almost certainly the mass ratio, but if you want to remove any doubt you can refer to ``gravimetric AFR.''

afraid of commitment
See fear of commitment.

AFRL
Air Force Research Laboratory. It's located at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, which I usually hear called ``Wright-Pat.''

AFRO
WHO (World Health Organization) Regional Office for AFrica. It really is a scrambled acronym: cf. EMRO, EURO (!), SEARO, or WPRO. It would be simpler if they just expanded it ``AFrican Regional Office of the WHO.''

AFRTS
(US) Armed Forces Radio and Television Service.

AFS
American Field Service. The name of a medical volunteer group that started out in 1914 as the ambulance arm of the American Hospital in Paris, and eventually evolved into an international pacifist organization. The AFS site offers a soft-focus, almost triumphalist or Whig history of itself. For a more interesting version, see this page about Literary Ambulance Drivers in WWI.

AFS
American Folklore Society. ``... serves to stimulate interest and research in all aspects of the study of folklore and folklife. The Society exists to further the discipline of folklore studies, to improve the professional well-being of its members, and to increase the respect given to diverse cultures and their traditions.''

Founded 1888, a constituent society of the ACLS since 1945. ACLS has an overview. We mention the AFS at our turd de force entry.

AFS
Andrew File System. A distributed file system developed at CMU. Effectively, this mounts all disks, with off-site file space having symbolic link directory names /afs/machine.tcp-ip.address/directory-address. Multiple requests to off-site data are satisfied from local cache. Does not appear to be in monstrously widespread use as of Spring 1996. It's used by ESPRIT's NoEs.

UPDATE: Since I'm now at Notre Dame, where AFS is used campus-wide, AFS does now ``appear to be monstrously widespread in use as of'' Summer 1996. I don't claim universal validity for appearances reported here. [Although I don't deny that this is a catholic institution, AFS is probably, in the strictest theological sense, an accident.]

AFS grew out of a Carnegie-Mellon University / IBM collaboration called Andrew, created to set up a distributed computing environment at CMU. The project was named for Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon.

AFS
Atomic Fluorescence Spectroscopy.

Here's some instructional material originally from Virginia Tech (VT).

AFSA
American Foreign Service Association.

AFSC
American Friends Service Committee. This was once an important pacifist organization.

AFSCME
Association of Federal, State, County and Municipal Employees. Rhymes roughly with ``Ask me.'' They once had a publicity campaign with the slogan ``Ask me about AFSCME.''

A member of the AFL-CIO; see comment on government-employee representation at NLRA.

AFSEEE
Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

AFSI
American Food Safety Institute. ``...the nation's leader in food manager training and certification [FMC].''

AFSOUTH
Allied (NATO) Forces SOUTHern Europe.

AFSPC
(US) Air Force SPace Command.

AFT
American Federation of Teachers. Founded and controlled by Albert Shanker until his death in around 1997. A merger with the larger NEA has been in on-again, off-again discussion for quite a while. Currently (as of June 2001) off again.

AFT
Arizona Federation of Teachers.

AFT
Automatic Fine Tuning. Same as Automatic Frequency Control (AFC).

afterlife
What happens to a person's intellectual activity after the person dies? It slows down considerably, by all accounts. In fact, I gave my mom -- who knows about this stuff -- a copy of Marian Thurm's novel The Clairvoyant (1997) to read, and her only remark on it that I can recall was that the ghost was way too lively.

According to instructions left by Alfred Nobel while he was still alive, his famous prize could not be awarded to anyone who had died before the year in which it was awarded.

AFTRA
American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. A trade union. A member of the AFL-CIO. Its membership of 80,000 (as of 1999) includes not only people in entertainment programming and commercials, but also in ``news broadcasting.'' This might disabuse those who think broadcast news is artless and without guile.

AFT2E, AFT²E
Association of Federal Technology Transfer Executives. Concerned with (encouraging, fostering, facilitating) transfer to the private sector of technology developed in federally-funded labs of the US.

AFU
Alt.Folklore.Urban. See the archive: TAFKAC.

AFV
Alternate-Fuel Vehicle.

AFV
America's Funniest Home Videos. An ABC television program that shows videos of people falling. You can't say there's no innovation on the program; the title used to be abbreviated AFHV.

AFV
Audio-Follow-Video. Switching mode in which audio signals are automatically routed with the video signals they're associated with.

AFVA
American Foundation for Vision Awareness. (If that link no longer works, try this.)

``The American Foundation for Vision Awareness (AFVA) is a non-profit charitable organization dedicated to educating the public about their vision, to creating awareness of quality eye and vision care and to supporting vision-related scientific research. The AFVA awards research grants and scholarships, conducts public service projects and provides educational materials to the public.''

AFZ
Acronym Free Zone. (Not its real name.)

[Football icon]

AF2
Arena Football 2. The minor league of the AFL, founded in 2000.

ag
AGriculture. All three major Scrabble dictionaries accept this word. According to the OSPD, it's a noun, so there's a plural ags.

AG, A.G.
Aktiengesellschaft. German, `stock company.' One kind of corporation. Closest approximation to Swedish AB, US Corp., British plc, or Italian S.p.A..

A/G
Albumin/Globulin [ratio].

A&G
Allen and Greenough. Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges, ultimately edited by J. B. Greenough, G. L. Kittredge, A. A. Howard, and Benj. L. D'Ooge. Now available free online. Yeah, the book is old -- but so is the language.

.ag
(Domain name code for) Antigua and Barbuda. The CIA Factbook has some basic information on the Emirates. On the Emirates? I must have cobbled this entry together from pieces of another entry.

AG
Arbeitsgemeinschaft. German: `Working Group.' A productive affix like the English WG, as for example in AGI. Also abbreviated A, as in AD and AMA.

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Ag
Chemical symbol for silver, from the Latin Argentum. Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

AG
Attorney General. Person who would, in the absence of this naming tradition, be called the Secretary of [the US, or a state's] Department of Justice. Plural is Attorneys General. Possessive seems to be Attorney General's. The traditional postpositive adjective arises from the official status of French in British government for a few centuries after Hastings.

AG
Authors Guild. The largest trade group in the US representing free-lance writers. They don't actually use the AG abbreviation themselves, but I'm sure someone does. There's a certain amount of staff and program overlap between this organization and Authors Registry (AR). They also share office space and a fax machine:
330 West 42nd Street, 29th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10036
fax: +1 (212) 564-5363

That missing apostrophe really gets on my nerves. I wish they would use the abbreviation.

This is probably as good a place as any to point out that the 212 area code has great cachet. It says ``uptown [Manhattan].'' Because of the high density of telephones in New York City, the area code has had to be restricted to a shrinking area, and this is a matter of some resentment, protest, and mourning in the newly abandoned areas.

AGA
Abrasive Grain Association. Well alright already, there's no need to become abusive! I didn't intend to rub you the wrong way.

``The membership of the AGA consists of manufacturers of Silicon Carbide [SiC] and Aluminum Oxide that is sold for use in abrasives.'' Oh.

AGA
American Gas Association.

Not related to

AGA
American Gastroenterological Association. Related link: ADHF.

Not related to preceding entry.

AGA
American Go Association. ``Go'' the game of black and white stones on a rectangular ruled board. Not ``go'' the English verb.

AGA
Assemblée générale annuelle. Translates AGM.

AGA
Association of Government Accountants. ``Advancing Government Accountability.''

``AGA serves government accountability professionals by providing quality education, fostering professional development and certification, and supporting standards and research to ...'' Advance Government Accountability!

AGAC
Advanced Genetic Analysis Center. At UMN. The name kinda suggests ``agh-- ack!''

AGAL
Australian Government Analytical Laboratories. Subsumed in NMI when that was established on July 1, 2004.

AGARD
(NATO) Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development.

AGB
Asymptotic Giant Branch. This is a kind of star. ``Branch'' refers to a curve that branches off the main sequence in the H-R diagram.

AGBELL, AG Bell
The Alexander Graham BELL Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

AGC
Associated General Contractors of America. ``The Associated General Contractors will be the association of choice for those associated with the construction industry.'' Sounds like something you'd write on an essay test if you didn't know the answer.

AGC
Assyrian General Conference.

AGC
Automatic Gain Control. A feature of receivers of analog broadcast signals: automatic adjustment of the gain (amplification) to compensate for variations in broadcast signal strength (and so to maintain output power).

AGC
AudioGraphic Conferencing. Terminology in the ITU-T's T.120 draft standard of transmission protocols for multimedia data. Okay, so it's outta alphabetical order. Gimme some artistic license.

AGCM
Atmospheric General Circulation Model.

AGD
A. A. Abrikosov, L. P. Gor'kov, and E. Dzyaloshinskii: Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963). A classic; sadly butchered in a new edition, I've heard.

AGD
Academy of General Dentistry.

AGD
Association Genevoise des Diabétiques.

age
This was a pretty lame entry, and the link was dead too.

agency shop
An employment where the labor contract stipulates that union nonmembers pay a fee for the services performed by the union. [At the very least, these must include collective bargaining. The certified union is required to represent every employee, member or not, under the terms of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, q.v.).] The agency shop is a weak form of the union shop, described in this glossary under the closed shop rubric.

age verification
Credit-card information. Terminology used at some of your more, uh, more graphics-intensive sites.

AGHAST
Ashtabulans of Geneva, Harpersfield, Austinburg & Saybrook Townships. An environmental group in Ashtabula County, Ohio. I am ah, appalled at how contrived their name is.

AGI
Academy for Guided Imagery. Sounds a bit like public relations, maybe advertising. But wait -- it has to do with health and medicine. Ah, I got it: it's about ``interactive medical imaging.'' That must be endoscopy, gastrocams, arthroscopy and stuff, right? No?

``Interactive Guided Imagerysm (IGIsm) utilizes imagery, the natural language of the unconscious mind. IGIsm is a powerful modality helping a patient/client connect with the deeper resources available to them at cognitive, affective and somatic levels. The guide's role is not to provide `better' images for the client, but to facilitate an enhanced awareness of the unconscious imagery the patient/client already has, and help clients learn to effectively work with this imagery on their own behalf. This process is capable of bringing about profound psychological and physiological change, as it simultaneously empowers and educates the patients.''

Oh. I, uh, see. I'll be sure to schedule an initial consultation/pitch. Real soon.

AGI
Adjusted Gross Income. A term used by the US IRS. If you need help preparing your tax return, try visiting the IRS website.

AGI
Agenzia Giornalistica Italia. Although this expansion occurs in the title text of its homepage, the initialism seems to be in the process of sealing up; in addition to such brands as AGI NEWS ON, AGI Sanità, and AGI Solution, one also sees AGI Agenzia Italia.

AGI
Arbeitsgemeinschaft Influenza im Kilian. `Influenza Working Group at Kilian,' Germany.

AGICOA
Association de Gestion Internationale Collective des Oeuvres Audiovisuelles. `Association for International Collective Management of Audio-Visual Works.'

``[S]et up in Geneva in 1981 as an international non-governmental organization, to defend [film] producers' copyrights, [e]specially as far as TV retransmission by cable is concerned.'' Has developed the International Standard AudioVisual Number (ISAN) jointly with CISAC.

agism
Cardinals over the age of 79 (such an odd number) are ineligible to vote for pope. It's a significant disability. In the second consistory of his reign, Pope Francis elevated 20 men to the College of Cardinals, and 5 were already too old to vote for his successor.

AGIT
Adjusted Gross Income Tax. This is the Indiana corporate income tax. AGIT is based on ``that part of the [corporation's] adjusted gross income derived from sources within the State of Indiana'' [Ind. Code Sec. 6-3-2-1 (1972)]. It is computed as a fraction of the federal income tax paid by the corporation.

Until 2003, the AGIT was one of three interlocking corporate income taxes. Another one was called the Gross Income Tax (GIT). This was based on (read carefully now) ``gross income derived from activities or businesses or any other source within the state of Indiana'' [Ind. Code Sec. 6-2-1-2 (1972)]. The GIT was a tax on gross receipts from the sale of products or services in Indiana.

The profits of a corporation doing business in Indiana may result from revenues received from anywhere in or out of state, so gross Indiana receipts alone (used to compute the GIT) won't show it (never mind computing the net). I believe that the GIT was the older tax, and that the AGIT was cooked up to capture revenues from interstate business.

Setting aside the tricky details of determining the Indiana fraction, the AGIT is based on all revenues in and out of Indiana, and the GIT was based on revenues from Indiana only. If all of the GIT and AGIT had been due, then revenue from Indiana would have been double-taxed. The intention was not to double the tax on Indiana receipts, but to tax once the income from non-Indiana receipts. However, the computation methods were completely different and determined (we won't say how accurately) either an all-Indiana number or an all-US number (let's talk about international trade some other day). In order, coarsely, to avoid double-taxing the income represented in the Indiana receipts, an amount up to the value of the GIT was ``credited against'' the AGIT. (I.e., the value of the GIT was credited to the payment of the AGIT if AGIT was greater. If GIT exceeded AGIT, then no AGIT was due.)

When the GIT was abolished, the GIT credit against the AGIT was abolished along with it, making the change roughly revenue-neutral while reducing the paperwork. I think this is called tax reform. There is the following internal complication for the state: GIT revenue used to go to the general fund while AGIT revenue went to a property-tax relief fund. When the GIT was abolished, perhaps this changed. The third Indiana corporate income tax of those days was the finely named SNIT (Supplemental Corporation Net Income Tax); it was repealed in 2003 as well.

AgIT
AGricultural Information Technology.

AGL
Above Ground Level. (Altitudes are quoted ``35 m AGL'' to indicate altitude above the local ground level. Cf. ``MSL.'')

AGL
l'Assemblée Générale des étudiants de Louvain.

AGM
Alternating-Gradient Magnetometer.

AGM
Annual General Meeting. Term is used by ACRID, NWR, OACL, and SHS, for instances. (AGA in French.)

AGM
Association Genevoise des Malentendants. Roughly, `Geneva Association for the Hard-of-Hearing.'

AGN
Active Galactic Nucle{i|us}. See M. C. Begelman, R. D. Blandford and M. D. Rees: Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 56, p. 255 (1984).

AgNIC
AGriculture Network Information Center. ``[A] guide to quality agricultural information on the Internet as selected by the National Agricultural Library, Land-Grant Universities, and other institutions.''

agnostic dyslexic insomniac
Lies awake nights wondering whether there really is a dog. Cf. Dyslexic Occultist.

AGO
American Gastroenterological Organization.

AGO
Art Gallery of Ontario. In Toronto.

AGONET
Antarctic Geospace Observatory NETwork. An Italian-hosted database for geomagnetic and ionospheric data from a number of cooperating groups.

agora
An Ancient Greek word (agorá) meaning `public place, assembly, market.' A Hebrew coin worth one cent of a shekel (NIS).

AGP
Accelerated Graphics Port. A dedicated bus designed to improve 3D graphics performance.

AGPAM
American Guild of Patient Account Management. They should have merged with the American Academy of Pain Management (AAPM). Instead, they became AAHAM.

AGPS
Australian Government Publishing Service.

AGR
Advanced Gas (fission) Reactor.

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AGreek, AGrk.
Ancient Greek. A language, not an epithet.

Debra Hamel maintains a list of summer courses in classical subjects, including classical Greek, offered by North American Universities. We even have a substantial entry on Greek right here in this glossary.

AGRICOLA
AGRICultural OnLine Access. A service of the National Agricultural Library (NAL). ``[A] bibliographic database of citations to the agricultural literature [broadly defined -- includes literature of plant and animal sciences, forestry, entomology, soil and water resources, agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, agricultural products, alternative farming practices, and food and nutrition] created by the National Agricultural Library and its cooperators [sic]. Production of these records in electronic form began in 1970, but the database covers materials in all formats, including printed works from the 15th century.''

agricola
Latin for `farmer.' One of the extremely rare (native) first-declension nouns that has male gender.

Something comparable occurs in Hebrew with av (`father'), which takes a plural in -ot (which is normally female): avot, `fathers.' (The very common informal singular form, aba, typically translated `dad,' is an Aramaic loan.) Perhaps the best-loved book of the Mishnah is Pirke Avot (`Wisdom of the Fathers'), a kind of quote book. Hebrew has the usual allotment of irregularities; there are a number of irregular grammatically male nouns with feminine-form plurals, but no other such common nouns that have male natural gender. Examples include the following:

(The masculine noun lailah, `night,' ends in the vowel qamats followed by the consonant heh, which makes it morphologically feminine.)

There is one common word -- ishah, meaning `woman, wife' -- that has natural female gender and masculine-form plural (nashim). The corresponding masculine words are ish, `man,' and anashim, `men.' The male and female singular forms are related in a standard way. On the other hand, the masculine plural is again irregular, though it at least has masculine form. Much of the strangeness, though not the male-form female plural, is understandable from the fact that ish is a shortened form of an older word for man: enosh.

Other grammatically female nouns with masculine-form plurals do not have a very clear common gender. Examples:

For more grammatical-number weirdness in Hebrew, see the chaim entry.

Agricola
Gnaeus Julius Agricola (lived CE 40-93). Governor of Roman Britain and father-in-law of Tacitus, who wrote a biography of him. There's another, more famous Agricola, but for historical reasons his information is elsewhere.

AGRIS
AGRIcultural Science and Technology Database.

AGS
AgGaS2. Silver Gallium Sulfide is a frequency-doubling crystal for IR (around CO2 10-µm lines). It's similar in properties to AGSe.

AGS
Alternating-Gradient Synchrotron. (Usually written without the hyphen.) Like the one at BNL.

AGS
American Geriatrics Society.

AGS
American Guitar Society. ``We are an organization dedicated to the interests of guitarists and those who enjoy guitar music'' and live near the campus of California State University, Northridge -- you know, like, in the valley. Founded in 1923, and a fine organization I have no doubt, but it doesn't seem to have any national events to go with its national name. I think we'll change the name of SBF to Stammtisch Beau Fleuve Mundial.

AGS
Americans for Gun Safety. See AGSF.

AGS
Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland. It was founded as the Conference of University Teachers of German in Great Britain and Ireland (eventuially abbreviated CUTG), and changed its name to the current one in 2009.

CUTG was founded in 1932. Searching the web for information about CUTG, I see this fact mentioned regularly without comment, as if 1932 were not a most inauspicious year in German and world history. [It's the year the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag. When my grandfather voted in the German presidential election of the spring of 1932, he told his daughter it was the last time he would vote there. He might have been wrong: The anti-republican vote (a solid majority) was split among the Nazis, the Communists, and the German National People's Party (along with some tiny parties), so Hitler was unable to create a dictatorship until after the Reichstag fire.] If there's a significant backstory to the founding of the CUTG, however, I haven't discovered it yet.

AGSe
AgGaSe2. Silver Gallium Selenide is a frequency-doubling crystal for IR (around the CO2 10-µm lines). Similar in properties to AGS.

AGSECAL
AGriculture SECtor Adjustment Loan. The handful of instances I can find of this acronym that do not occur on a page that mentions the World Bank mostly occur on pages that mention la Banque Mondiale or el Banco Mundial or suchlike.

The World Bank has been issuing these loans to national agricultural development programs since the 1980's. The story goes that AGSECAL's issued before 1991 were ``not fully market-oriented'' and ``did not face basic policy constraints,'' and consequently their growth impact was limited. Since then, however, those problems have been fixed and now the impact of AGSECAL's is merely difficult to measure. I would find this all a lot more amusing of I didn't pay taxes.

AGSF
Americans for Gun Safety Foundation. The old website has a floating window with a message that begins ``Americans for Gun Safety (AGS) and the AGS Foundation (AGSF) have been folded into Third Way, an organization founded and operated by the former AGS and AGSF management team.'' The box to close the window is actually a link to the Third Way homepage.

AGT
Association of Genetic Technologists. ``[F]ounded in 1975, [it] is a non-profit professional organization established to promote cooperation and exchange of information among those engaged in classical cytogenetics, molecular and biochemical genetics, and to stimulate interest in genetics as a career.''

AGT
AudioGraphics Terminal.

AGU
Address-Generation Unit.

AGU
American Geophysical Union.

AGU
Automatic Ground Unit.

agua
Spanish, `water.' You will often see this preceded by the male definite article: ``el agua.'' This is done to avoid the dysphony (called hiatus) of la-a, and is common practice with female nouns beginning in a. Grammatical gender is otherwise unaffected, however. The noun agrees with female adjectives (el agua tibia, `the warm water') and takes a female article in the plural (las aguas, `the waters'). The pronunciation of agua is discussed at the AWWA entry.

aguantar
A Spanish word that can sometimes be translated `to tolerate.' The semantic range of the word does not match very well any English words as I know them to be used. The reason is that aguantar always implies patience, or an element of time, like the English endure, but is not used, like endure, in the simple sense of last (which lacks the element of suffering or stress).

You can translate ¡no aguanto más! fairly accurately as `I can't stand it any more!' You can also translate no lo aguanto as `I can't stand him.' However, in this phrase the English stand, though etymologically related to stay, no longer carries the implication that what one specifically can't stand is some amount of time with him. You can instantaneously not stand someone. If you want to express this specific meaning in Spanish, you're better off saying you detest him (lo odio) or even that you can't tolerate him (no lo tolero).

Anyway, that's my Sprachgefühl on the subject.

According to Corominas y Pascual, aguantar is not etymologically related to agua. Instead, it appears to be derived from the Italian verb agguantare (with a somewhat different meaning). That Italian word is certainly derived from the Italian guanto (cf. Span. guante) meaning `glove.' The reference is to the mailed fist of a medieval knight.

aguantol
Jocular term in Spanish for the null medical analgesic, from aguantar + -ol (ending common in the names of drugs, associated with the -ol chemical ending for alcohols). `Bearitol,' to coin a translation, with the added element of a pun on all. The idea is that if you're out of the usual pharmaceuticals like NSAID's, you take aguantol instead (i.e., you put up with it).

AGV
Automated Guided Vehicle.

AGVS
Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) System[s].

AGW
Anthropogenic Global Warming.

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AGWG
Abhandlungen der Gesellschaft der Wissenchaften zu Göttingen. `Proceedings of the Scientific Society at Goettingen.' AGWG, Philologisch-Historische Klasse was a classics journal (which classicists tended to abbreviate simply as AGWG). The current title is Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Philologisch-Historische Klasse. It wasn't and isn't catalogued in TOCS-IN.

Agy
AGencY. Usually used as an abbreviation only for an organizational entity, and not for the concept of being an agent.

Ah, AH
Ampere-Hour (3.6 kilocoulombs). Common unit with batteries. A magnesium alkaline AA cell typically has a charge of 2.4 AH.

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AH
Ancient History. Journal catalogued by TOCS-IN.

AH, A.H.
Anno Hegirae. Latin, `[in the] year of the hegira.' 1 AH began at sunset on July 15, 622 AD (Julian). Different transliterations of hegira (hejira, hijra, ...) occur not just for the usual reason that source and target language have different phonemics, but also because Arabic is variously pronounced.

AH
Art Histor{ y | ian }.

AHA
Advanced Hardware Architectures.

AHA
American Heart Association.

AHA
American Hippotherapy Association.

``The American Hippotherapy Association Inc. (AHA Inc.) is a group of medical professionals (physical, occupational and speech therapists) and others who are interested in the use of equine movement as a treatment strategy. AHA is an affiliate partner of The North American Riding for the Handicapped Association (NARHA), a national non-profit organization.''

Getting Medicare to pay for something that doesn't have a number in some diagnostic manual must make bronc-busting look like child's play.

A (therapeutic) masseuse I know owns four horses. I'll have to ask her about this.

I asked. She says she really has three too many.

AHA
American Historical Association, ``the professional association for all historians.'' Founded 1884, a constituent society of the ACLS since 1919. ACLS has an overview.

Met Jan. 8-11, 1998 in Seattle, Washington, and Jan. 7-10, 1999 in the other Washington. Meetings Jan. 6-9, 2000 (Chicago) and Jan. 4-7, 2001 (Boston). It seems they like to have meetings beginning every 364 days (2000 is a leap year). Hmmm. 364 is an even multiple of seven.

There's also an Organization of American Historians (OAH), and now a Historical Society, on the initiative of that entertaining guy Eugene D. Genovese, set up specifically as an alternative:

``Some historians have banded together to form a new professional association, the Historical Society, to serve as an alternative to the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. Leaders of the new group, such as Eugene D. Genovese and Donald Kagan, say its emphasis will be on research and ideas. They blast the existing groups for historians for focusing too much on current political issues and obsessing over issues such as race, class, and gender. While leaders say that they want the group to be ideologically diverse, many of its organizers are conservatives. Some scholars -- including some liberal professors -- are welcoming the new organization. Others see it as a new club for conservatives who are hostile to recent trends in scholarship, and the increased diversity of the professoriate. Is this new organization needed? Are the AHA and the OAH less useful than they once were or could be? Should they be reformed, replaced, or praised?''

AHA
American Homeowners Association.

AHA
American Hospital Association. Celebrated its centennial in 1998.

AHA
American Hyperlexia Association.

As with priapism, hyperlexia is an affliction for which it might be hard to gain sympathy. At least at first, people might suppose you're bragging rather than complaining. Hyperlexia is a childhood syndrome named after its most positive symptom: a precocious ability to read. Unfortunately, this is coupled with difficulty in understanding and producing spoken language. The problem seems to arise from difficulty in mastering grammar and (other) abstract concepts. There are usually also problems of socialization, but it is not clear whether this is not largely a consequence of the verbal deficiencies.

The good news is that many or most children grow out of the syndrome around age five or six, though some difficulties may remain. A widespread complaint among parents with hyperlexic children is of the absence of resources, informational or organizational, so here's a page about it from a site called K12 Academics.

AHA
Anesthesia History Association.

You expect me to say ``I don't remember a thing,'' but I've got too much class for that kind of cheap humor.

AHA
Angus Housing Association. Wouldn't they be happier just grazing in the grass? The AHA has offices in Dundee and --oh! -- Angus.

AHA
Art History and Archaeology.

AHA
Australian Healthcare Association.

AHA
Australian Historical Association. Nowadays (since 2002), the main activity of the AHA is repelling the violent assault by Keith Windschuttle. (His book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, published Dec. 2002, argues that academic historians' accepted view of Australian colonial history is a politically correct fraud. The academic view, since the 1970's or so, is that the settler society engaged in a pattern of conquest, dispossession and killing of the indigenous inhabitants.)

Interestingly, both the Australian and American Historical Associations have chosen theaha as their organizational domain name (theaha.org.au and theaha.org). I assume that in both cases, others (Australian Hotels and American Hospital Associations) had already occupied the <aha.org>'s.

AHA
Australian Hotels Association. Est'd. 1839.

AHAC
Aboriginal Health Access Centre.

AHAF
American Health Assistance Foundation.

AHANA
African-American, Hispanic, Asian and Native American. Aha-ha.

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AHB
Ancient History Bulletin. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.

AHBA
American Home Business Association. Also see the related CENA, NASE and, of course, SBA.

AHC
Academic Health Center. A teaching hospital that may not necessarily be a hospital, exactly. The acronym AHC is also used for the Association of Academic Health Centers. I guess if you're really, really smart, you handle the disambiguation dilemma.

AHC
Amorphous, Hydrogenated Carbon.

AHC
Association of Academic Health Centers. Not ``AAHC.''

AHCA
American Health Care Association.

A&HCI, AHCI
Arts & Humanities Citation Index. A product of ISI, q.v.

AHCPR
Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. Former name of AHRQ.

ahd.
Abbreviation of German althochdeutsch, `Old High German' (OHG, q.v.). In German, as in French and Spanish and probably most West European languages other than English, adjectives related to proper nouns are not capitalized even though the corresponding proper nouns are. Hence deutsch (with its inflected forms deutsche, deutschen, deutscher, deutsches) is the adjective `German' (referring to language and nationality) and das Deutsch is the proper noun `German' (referring specifically to `the German language). An abbreviation for the noun Althochdeutsch (which would also be capitalized) is not common in German dictionaries; instead, ahd. is inserted as a modifier before relevant etymons.

AHD
American Health Decisions.

AHD
American Heritage Dictionary. See AHD4.

AHD
American Hospital Directory. ``The American Hospital Directory provides online data for over 6,000 hospitals. Our database of information is built from Medicare claims data (MedPAR and OPPS), hospital cost reports, and other public use files obtained from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
The American Hospital Directory is not affiliated with the American Hospital Association (AHA). Data is from both public and private sources.''

AHDA
Animal Health Distributors Association. ``AHDA is an Association of responsible animal health product distributors, dedicated to serving the best interests of its members; in particular by protecting their rights to sell and supply, and securing the continued availability of, a wide range of non-prescription animal medicines.''

AHD4
Fourth Edition of the AHD, published in 2000, available online at the Bartleby reference site.

AHE
Anomalous Hall Effect.

AHEAD
Animal Health/Emerging Animal Disease.

AHEAD
(Irish) Association for Higher Education Access and Disability.

AHEAD
Association for Higher Education And Disability. I imagine that they're for these things in different senses of the word for.

AHEAD
Assets and HEAlth Dynamics of the Oldest Old. ``A national survey of community-based [I think that means not institutionalized] Americans born in 1923 or earlier. It is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging. The focus of the AHEAD survey is to understand the impacts and interrelationships of changes and transitions for older Americans in three major domains: health, financial, and family.''

AHF
AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

AHF
American Health Foundation. A research center that focused on prevention rather than treatment. (You know -- the responsible and joyless approach to health: cutting out eating, relaxing, smoking, drinking, and other pleasureable vices, instead of cancerous tumors). Founded in 1969, later renamed the Institute for Cancer Protection. It went bankrupt in 2004. It seems to be a popular target of conspiracy theorists on the web, based on somewhat thin evidence.

AHF
AntiHemophilic Factor. Earlier name for AHG.

AHFS
American Hospital Formulary Service.

AHFS DI
American Hospital Formulary Service Drug Information.

AHG
Anti-Hemophilic Globulin. In Britain, biotic processes differ somewhat, and the rôle of this substance is filled by something quite different that is known as Anti-Haemophilic Globulin, which conveniently and largely coincidentally has the same acronym. The latter substance was first isolated by A. J. Patek and F. H. L. Taylor in 1937. Now renamed clotting factor VIII (this is the seventh clotting factor, since there is no factor VI), this is the factor missing from the blood of untreated individuals suffering from classic hemophilia.

AHG
(UK) Association for the History of Glass, Ltd. Functions as the British section of l'AIHV.

AHHC
APPN Host-to-Host Channel.

AHI
American Health Institute. A company that sells food supplements.

AHI
Animal Health Institute. ``The Animal Health Institute is the U.S. trade association that represents manufacturers of animal health care products - the pharmaceuticals, vaccines and feed additives used to produce a safe supply of meat, milk, poultry and eggs, and the veterinary medicines that help pets live longer, healthier lives.''

ahí
Spanish word meaning `[over] there.'

AHIMA
American Health Information Management Association. Currently (February 2005) the name of an organization founded as the Association of Record Librarians of North America (ARLNA, q.v.).

AHIP
America's Health Insurance Plans. A lobbying group that campaigned against the Clintons' health care proposals in 1994.

AHIRC
Artists' Health Insurance Resource Center. ``The AHIRC database was created in 1998 by The Actors' Fund of America, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as a health insurance resource for artists and people in the entertainment industry. Since then, with support from The Commonwealth Fund, it has expanded to include resources for the self-employed, low-income workers, the under-insured, the uninsured who require medical care and many other groups.'' (Emphasis added by SBF.) The site sports, in larger letters than the Artists' expansion, the expansion ``Access to Health Insurance/Resources for Care.'' The idea is probably that not every waiter is waiting for his big acting break.

(The Actors' Fund of America is ``a nonprofit organization founded in 1882, provides for the social welfare of all entertainment professionals--designers, writers, sound technicians, musicians, dancers, administrators, directors, film editors, stagehands--as well as actors.'')

AHJ
Accounting Historians Journal.

AHJ
American Heart Journal.

AHL
Amanda Holdings Ltd. The webpage explains: ``It's not hockey!'' They have a page of links to the ``AHL'' that you were looking for.

AHL
American Hockey League. One of three North American hockey minor leagues (the others are IHL and ECHL).

AHLHA
Armory Hill Living History Association.

AHM
American Helicopter Museum (and Education Center).

>Ahm

An old German unit of liquid measure equal to one Ohm. It had other A-names as well, ultimately from the (medieval?) Latin ama (so I presume it kept feminine gender). Back in the day, liquid measure was of two sorts: wine and beer. The Ahm was clearly a wine measure, typically about 40 (wine) gallons. The volume represented by an Ahm varied by a few gallons from city to city in Germany.

AHM
Autonomous Homing Munitions. Shoot and scoot.

AHMA
Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology.

AHMA
American Holistic Medical Association.

AHMAC
Australian Health Ministers Advisory Council.

AHNW
Advanced Heterostructure and Nanostructure Workshop, or something like that. Now (since 2008, at least as of 2012) WINDS (Workshop on Innovative Nanoscale Devices and Systems), q.v.

AHP
Academy of Hospice Physicians. Founded in 1988, now called the AAHPM.

AHP
Accountable Health Plan.

AHP
The Association for Healthcare Philanthropy. It ``is the only association dedicated exclusively to advancing and promoting the health care development profession. Resource development professionals turn to AHP for the very latest in fund-raising education and information.''

AHPA, A.H.P.A.
American Horseshoe Pitchers Association of America. That's the name given on the organization's homepage, but AHPA is often expanded ``American Horseshoe Pitchers Association'' -- for brevity, I imagine. Either that or they'll take anyone who pitches American horseshoes, no matter where they pitch them. Oops, strike that idea: from 1921 to 1949, it was the ``National Horseshoe Pitchers Association of the United States of America.'' It had been founded in 1914 as the ``Grand League of the American Horseshoe Pitchers Association.'' Anyway, it's not about baseball pitchers with a wicked curve.

AHPAT
Allied Health Professions Admission Test.

AHQR
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

AHR
American Historical Review. Journal catalogued by TOCS-IN; I have no idea why.

AHRA
Acton Hot Rod Association. They aren't a racing organization; they are ``a group of people interested in the culture of Street, Strip, Custom, Retro and Modified vehicles of all shapes and sizes. We meet up once a month, take part in shows, even hold our own!''

AHRA
American Hot Rod Association. A drag-racing sanctioning body that came into being in 1955 as a competitor to the already established NHRA. It was eclipsed as drag-racing's number two by the IHRA, which was created in 1970. The AHRA went out of business in 1984.

AHRB
UK Arts and Humanities Research Board.

AHRC
UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

AHRI
American Heritage Rivers Initiative. I guess this is not the most self-explanatory name. The most prominent link at the AHRI homepage is anchored on the words ``What is the American Heritage Rivers Initiative?'' Along about now you're probably beginning to get impatient, thinking ``yes, yes, and what is the answer to that question?'' I don't know. It seems to be a pot of money with no strings attached, for the US government to give to others to spend in various ways, but the documentation provided by the EPA is an executive order that doesn't refer to any enabling legislation, so it's not especially obvious where the money comes from. I guess it's general EPA funds.

The AHRI ``has three objectives: natural resource and environmental protection, economic revitalization, and historic and cultural preservation.'' I suppose if they felt like it, they could turn down every request for funds on the grounds that in furthering one of the objectives, it was counterproductive of another. That at least would pretty much solve the funding problem.

AHRQ
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Part of the DHHS. Formerly the AHCPR.

AHS
American Helicopter Society. (Notice that the domain name is <vtol.org>.)

AHS
American Headache Society. Previously called AASH.

AHS
American Hemochromatosis Society.

AHS
American Horticultural Society.

AHS
The Antiquarian Horological Society. SBF has a small horology entry as well.

AHS
Asian Health Services. Mission: ``To serve and advocate for the immigrant and refugee Asian community regarding its health rights, and to assure access to health care services regardless of income, insurance status, language, or culture.''

AHS
Australian Herpetological Society.

AHSR
Association for Health Services Research. ``The Association for Health Services Research is the only national membership organization devoted to the promotion of research focused on the delivery, quality and financing of the United States health care system.'' (Quoted from the old website at <http://www.ahsr.org/>.) Afterwards it became the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy, and since then AcademyHealth:

``AcademyHealth is the professional home for health services researchers, policy analysts, and practitioners, and a leading, non-partisan resource for the best in health research and policy.''

AHT
Anchor-Handling Tug. Tugboats that tug anchors, derricks and other immovable stuff.

AHT
Animal Health Trust.

AHTS
Anchor-Handling Tug/Supply. Hybrid supply ship and AHT.

AHU
Air-Handling Unit.

AHW
Advanced Heterostructure Workshop. Succeeded by WINDS (Workshop on Innovative Nanoscale Devices and Systems), q.v.

AI, a.i.
Active Ingredient. Placebos haven't any. (American: Have none. Don't have any.) [American makes much less frequent use than British of negative contractions of verbs not functioning as modals.]

ai
A family of tree sloths of Central and South America. Here's a shorter entry in English. One of the most important animals in Scrabble®. All three major Scrabble dictionaries accept this important two-letter word, as well as ais.

AI
Aggressiveness Index. Oooh! What's this manly expansion doing here between a sloth and a pansy like ``Amnesty International''? It's called intimidation.

AI is a term used in the water-treatment field.

AI
American Idol. A TV program.

AI
Amnesty International. Here's an entry from the same dictionary that gives the animal Ai link above.

[column]

Ai
An ancient Canaanite city that God let it be difficult for Joshua to conquer, as punishment for a spoils-of-war segmentation error. This rather took the bloom off the rose of the Jericho success. See book of Joshua, from chapter 7. There must be a lesson in this somewhere. Cf. AI.

Actually, ai means `ruin,' and the ruins referred to biblically are usually identified (after W. F. Albright) with a site found at Et-tel. That site was destroyed in the early Bronze Age and abandoned until the Iron Age, which well explains the name, but not how it was a battle site. The guess (of Alan Millard) is that it was normally unoccupied but served as a fortress in war.

AI
Angewandte Informatik. Applied Informatics (cog sci, call it).

.ai
(Domain name code for) Anguiilla.

AI
Appraisal Institute. ``A worldwide organization dedicated to real estate appraisal education, publishing and advocacy.'' Based in Chicago.

AI
Aortic Insufficiency.

AI
Application Identifier.

AI
Artificial Insemination. Vide JSAI.

AI
Artificial Intelligence. Occasionally leads to Architectural Inelegance. Vide JSAI.

AI
Artificial Island.

AI
Asphalt Institute. It sounds like an institute dedicated to putting the onus on the anus -- or is that a hemionus?

AIA
Accuracy In Academia.

AIA
Aerospace Industries Association of America. (The name is normally given with the ``of America'' but the abbreviation AIAA is avoided to prevent confusion with another AIAA.) The AIA co-sponsors (with NAR) the Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC, q.v.).

The AIA began its organizational life in 1919 as the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce of America (ACCA, q.v.). Following WWII, the ACCA reorganized and refocused on civilian business, and changed its name to Aircraft Industries Association of America, Inc. The initial A-word was changed to Aerospace in 1959.

AIA
American Iatrogenic Association. In principle, the name is ambiguous because iatrogenic is just an adjective meaning `originating with the physician.' But what originates with the physician? I don't know and it's driving me to mental illness! Is it that the Association that originates with physicians? Yes, that's not it. In practice, iatrogenic is only ever used in reference to one kind of thing. ``The American Iatrogenic Association is devoted to the study and reporting of medical errors that lead to disease and death.''

AIA
American Infertility Association.

According to this FAQ from AIA, ``Couples are considered infertile when they're unable to conceive after a year of unprotected sex--the standard definition. On average it'll take six months for a 30-year-old couple to achieve a pregnancy and nine months for those five years older. Indeed, at age 37 approximately half of all couples will fail to conceive within a year. By the time they reach 42,that number may be much higher.''

The word average in the preceding is used imprecisely.

AIA
American Institute of Architects. If that link has collapsed, try e-architect (that seems to be their new e-digs). The AIA is the main national professional association of architects in the US.

AIA
American Insurance Association. ``The Advocate for Property-Casualty Insurers.''

AIA
Anno Independentiae Americanae. Latin, `Year of American Independence.' A designation for dates that numbers years from 1 starting in AD 1776. Just to keep things simple, the first year of independence is taken to be the whole of 1776, starting in January. There's an example on line. Here's a mostly accurate online transcription (image of original here) of a diploma dated the twentieth day of July, 1859. The date is given thus:
Datum ex aedibus academicis die Vicessimo Julii Anno Salutis millesimo octigentesimo quinquagesimo Nono Anno Independentiae Americanae Octogessimo quarto.
Capitalization and spelling above are they appeared in the original; the underlined words were filled in by hand and appear to have ss where ns or s should appear (vicensimo or vicesimo, and similarly octogensimo or octogesimo). I would never make a mistake like that in Latin. I would make it in English. Anno Salutis is `year of salvation' (equiv. A.D.). He serves images of some other similarly dated university documents, linked from our S.P.D. entry.

Traditionally, years were designated according to the reigns of monarchs -- ``in the first year of the illustrious reign of Bozo the Diffident,'' etc. (In the Roman republic, years were identified by who the consuls were. See also A.U.C.) By the time of the American Revolution this practice had been long abandoned for practical dating, but naming years according to the non-reign of a monarch was still an interesting sort of (formal) innovation. I don't think Cromwell would have done it. The fashion was adopted (perhaps invented) by the French during their revolution. The French Revolution was a glorious affair that was so successful that it has so far led to five republics in France alone. It also led to bloodbath, dictatorships, and a war that engulfed Europe. It continues to be an inspiration to those who prefer their revolutions to be bloody and to result in dictatorships ostentatiously in the service of the people. The French Revolution is fondly remembered and celebrated by the French to this day, and the year that kicked it off (1789) has also been the start date of a couple of calendars. The revolutionary calendar was more revolutionary, not just renaming months but also instituting ten-day weeks. The philosophical calendar of Comte retained seven-day weeks and was full of secular saint days.

AIA
Archaeological Institute of America.

656 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02215-2010
Tel.: (617) 353-9364
Fax (617) 353-6550

The AIA publishes the AJA and Archaeology Magazine.

The AIA and the American Philological Association (APA) hold their annual meeting jointly. It doesn't take much training to learn how to distinguish the archaeologists and the classicists by how they dress. Also present in small numbers are ``angels'' -- rich folk in rich dress who make many of the expeditions possible.

The AIA is a scholarly society, so if any of your friends belong, you know that -- even if they're just ``Grazing In The Grass'' -- they're Friends of Distinction.

I-can-dig-it he-can-dig-it she-can-dig-it we-can-dig-it they-can-dig-it you-can-dig-it. Oh, let's dig it.... Can you dig it baby?!

AIAA
Aerospace Industries Association of America. Try to use AIA instead. AIA is standard for this organization, and it avoids confusion with...

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

[column]

AIAC
Associazione Internazionale di Archeologia Classica. The AIAC holds a congress every five years. The XVI International Congress of Classical Archaeology, first to be held in the United States, was hosted by Harvard University Art Museums (by the Department of Ancient and Byzantine Art and Numismatics, in particular), 23-26 August 2003.

AIAG
Automobile Industry Action Group.

AIAI
All India Association of Industries.

AIA/IAA - Canada
Archaeological Institute of America/Institut Archéologique d'Amérique, an independent Canadian affiliate (founded 1994) of the Boston-based Archaeological Institute of America (AIA).

AIAM
Association of International Automobile Manufacturers.

AI/AN
American Indian/Alaska Native.

AIAS
Asociación de Industrias de Acabados de Superficies. `Association of surface-finish industries.'

AIB
Academy of International Business. (If the above link doesn't work, try <http://aib.msu.edu/>.)

``[T]he leading association of scholars and specialists in the field of international business.
Established in 1959, today, AIB has nearly 3000 members in 65 different countries around the world. Members include scholars from the leading global academic institutions as well consultants, researchers, and NGO representatives. ...''

AIB
Akademie für Internationale Bildung. ``We at AIB are specialists in international higher education, located in Bonn and Düsseldorf, both in the heart of Europe.'' This isn't inaccurate, but it seems tactically imprecise. They might have said that these two cities are both in the heart of Germany. They also have an irritating habit of never referring to themselves by exactly the same name twice. One name is ``The AIB Academy of International Education Duesseldorf Germany.'' (The intended sense of the German noun Bildung here is `education.' Until we have a Bildungsroman entry, I'll just mention here that the single word that most frequently works as a good translation of the German verb bilden (cognate with English build, of course) is form. Bildung, corresponding to building, means `formation' of some kind. On the other hand, Bild has come to have the meaning of `picture.' Don't think that's so odd; English build in the sense of body type might seem as strange.)

AIB
Allied Irish Banks. Typically described as ``Ireland's largest bank,'' vel sim. I suppose it would have been a mite awkward to have named the thing ``Allied Irish Bank,'' although that name is often used in practice. They should have come up with a different name altogether. Contradictory grammatical number are a nuisance.

Oh yeah, and it shares its initialism (more commonly used than the name) with Anglo Irish Bank. Brilliant.

AIB
American Institute of Baking. They offer solutions solutions solutions -- audits, education and training, research and technical.

AIB
American Institute of Banking. Courses offered online and also in classrooms around Michigan by the MBA (not that MBA) through the ABA (not that ABA). Ohnowait -- sometimes the first Google hit isn't the best. It turns out that ``The American Institute of Banking (AIB) is a national organization dedicated to offering professional continuing education and training to bankers. More than 100,000 participants enroll annually in our courses, making this service of the American Bankers Association one of the largest industry-sponsored training organizations in the world.''

``ABA Local Training Providers can be found throughout the United States and in Guam.'' What about the Upper Peninsula?

AIB
American Investment Bank, N.A. Based in Salt Lake City, member FDIC, and has pictures of smiling people on its homepage. What more do you want?

AIB
Anglo Irish Bank. (Banc Angla-Éireannach.) It's headquartered in Dublin, especially since January 2009, when it was nationalized. It shares its initialism with Allied Irish Banks.

AIB
Atlantic Insurance Brokers, L.L.C. Insures trucking, hauling, cargo, freight, and autos.

AIB
Automobile Insurers Bureau of Massachusetts.

AIBOA
Association des Infirmières de Bloc Opératoire d'Aquitaine. If I saw a boa, I'd go ``Aiiiii!'' too. `Association of operating-room nurses of Aquitaine.'

AIBOB
Association des Infirmières de Bloc Opératoire de Bretagne. Spongebob's French friend. ``Aii, my frhrhriend! Ah-lo!'' `Association of operating-room nurses of guess.' (No, not Great Britain... try again.)

AIBS, aibs
American Institute of Biological Sciences. That was something in the 1970's. Since then, the similarity in sound to AIDS must have prompted a change of name.

Hmmm -- somehow I missed their website when I first put in this entry. ``... a national center for biologists & the biological sciences ....'' `` established under federal charter in 1947 as part of the National Academy of Sciences... In 1955 AIBS became an independent, member-governed, 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization.''

AIC
Alfven Ion Cyclotron instability. A plasma instability near the ion cyclotron frequency.

AIC
Alive In Christ (Lutheran Church). Welcome to the AIC WorshipWeb!

AIC
Appraisal Institute of Canada. Institut canadien des évaluateurs. Not based in Chicago. (Cf. next entry, or this earlier one, to ``get'' this lame joke.)

AIC, aIC
The Art Institute of Chicago. A museum and a SAIC.

Since its founding, the museum has been committed to maintaining a location near the center of town, as it does today with a location on Michigan Avenue. Its exhibits are housed in three buildings that straddle a railroad track (and which are only connected at one level as a result).

The museum owns ``American Gothic,'' the instantly recognizable picture of a farmer with his pitchfork and his blonde wife (he holds the former) standing impassive and about scowling before their home, which has a Gothic-style gable window and seven walk-in closets. Some of this description, particularly the emotional state of the pitchfork, is inference or speculation. The relationships of the people in front of the house to each other and to the house itself are not what I expected. The picture was painted by Grant Wood in 1930. The couple posed before the house didn't live there. They are Grant Wood's sister Nan (playing the part not of a farmer's wife but of his unmarried daughter) and his dentist. The painting has an enigmatic ambiguity, but unlike La Giaconda, facial expression in the picture is describable.

AICA
Association of Independent Care Advisers. It ``represents organisations based in the UK dedicated to helping people identify the most appropriate type of care service and care provider for their individual needs.''

AICAD
Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. You can't imagine how thrilled I am that this is not computer-designed designing computers (Artificial Intelligence Computer-Aided Design).

Despite that, I can't help but be troubled by the notion of an association of independents. You can't be completely independent if you're part of an association. Cf. IGA.

AICC
Autonomous Intelligent Cruise Control. Is Katie up to the task?

AICCCA
Association of Independent Consumer Credit Counseling Agencies.. ``[A] national membership organization, established to promote quality and consistent delivery of credit counseling services. They have a street address on Random Hills Road.

AICGS
American Institute for Contemporary German Studies.

Some balding academics with compensatory facial hair, yacking about events they can't make a dent in.

AIChE
American Institute of Chemical Engineers. A member society of the AAES.

Back in 1996 or so, their homepage had irritating (<BLINK>) flashing, which I appropriately condemned at this entry. Just to show what a good great sport I am, and how I let bygones be bygones, and how I don't keep harping on every little thing and all, I praised them for their eventual decision to eliminate the blink. Don't let it happen again.

AICO
Association pour l'intégration communautaire de l'Ontario. See OACL.

AICP
The Absolutely Incredible Counting Page.

AICPA
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

AICR
American Institute for Cancer Research.

AICR
Association for International Cancer Research.

AICUO
Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Ohio. An affiliate of NAICU.

AID
Agency for International Development. An independent agency of the US government.

AID
Artificial Insemination (with) Donor. (I.e., with a third party.)

AID
Artificial Intelligence in Design.

AIDA
Amherst Industrial Development Agency. Amherst is a northern suburb of Buffalo, New York.

AIDA
Automobile Information Disclosure Act of 1958. The act requires certain information to be clearly displayed on new cars offered for sale (see the Autopedia for details) and was authored by A.S. ``Mike'' Monroney, a longtime US congressman from Oklahoma. (The FAA also has a Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City.) More about the nexus of Oklahoma, car sales, and honesty (or rather its absence) at the entry for Sock it to me.

The required information must appear on a window sticker legally removable only by the purchaser. The sticker is called a ``Monroney sticker,'' but the proper noun is mispronounced or ``mispronounced'' ``Moroney'' throughout the automotive sales, uh, profession. Prophet motive rules. More at the MSRP entry.

Aïda
An opera by Verdi.

AIDC
Automatic Identification and Data Collection. Something that happens at the checkout counter. See also express lane, UPC.

aide
Anti-Christ or devil. As we all know, God is to be thanked for anything good that happens. When things go wrong, someone else must be blamed.

AIDS
Acquired Immune (response) Deficiency Syndrome. Here's an aerial view of the AIDS quilt.

In Japanese, this disease is called by a domesticated prounciation of the English acronym: eizu.

AIDS Dementia Complex
Dementia is the most common central nervous system (CNS) complication directly due to HIV infection (as opposed to the indirect complications that result from secondary, opportunistic infections (toxo, Crypto, PML, others) which attack the immune-compromised individual, and also as opposed to the depression that patients experience indirectly -- as a result of the lousy prognosis, not to mention lymphoma).

HIV is neurotropic, invading CNS and peripheral nervous system (PNS) beginning early in the infection. The cause of dementia appears to be at least partly the neurotoxic effect of the virus itself (neurotoxic effects have been identified in at least the gp120 virus coat protein, and in Tat -- transactivator protein from the interior of the virus). Although substantial cell loss has been identified, the main source of cognitive deficit seems to be the destruction of white matter -- the myelin coat that provides electric insulation for nerve processes. There is also evidence of a pathological contribution from toxins released by nerve cells that have been attacked.

AIDS dementia was first identified in 1983, and was initially called ``AIDS encephalopathy,'' ``AIDS encephalitis,'' or ``subacute encephalitis,'' reflecting the incorrect early hypothesis that it was caused by inflammation of the brain, possibly subacute but chronic. The latest name for it is HAD, for HIV-Associated Dementia complex. The switch from AIDS to HIV in the name reflects the understanding that it is caused in some way by the direct toxicity of the HIV virus, rather than secondary infection or by the reaction to secondary infections.

AIE
Associazione Italiana di Epidemiologia.

AIEA
Huh? Je ne parle pas français. Maybe you want the IAEA entry, eh?

AIEF
ARMA International Educational Foundation. Originally created in January 1973 as a tax-exempt Education and Scholarship Fund of ARMA. It was renamed and restructured in 1996-7.

AIEP
Asociación International de Escritores Policiacos. Probably better known by its English name, International Association of Crime Writers. International thoughts on this can be found at the IACW entry.

I want you to know that it gives me a real feeling of accomplishment as a lexicographer, when I can put an AIEP entry tidily next to an AIEQ entry. One day, preferably during my lifetime, this page is going to be as alphabetically solid as a brick wall.

AIEHL
Association des Internes en Exercice des Hôpitaux de Lille. French, `Association of Interns practicing in Hospitals of Lille.' (No, it's not internists.)

AIEQ
Association internationale des études québécoises. I get the études thing (`studies') but the rest is pretty opaque.

AIEEE
Acronym Interaction, Expansion and Extrapolation Engine. A practical tool served by The Brunching Shuttlecocks, which expands any two- to six-letter acronym. I mean any. If accuracy didn't occasionally count for something, the SBF glossary would be obsolete. Whimper!

Aieeee!
Excited vocalization.

[column]

AIEGL
Association Internationale d'Épigraphie Grecque et Latine. I don't know a link yet. There are American (ASGLE) and British (BES) chapters.

AIESEC
L'Association Internationale des Étudiants en Sciences Économiques et Commerce. (Pronounced ``eye-seck.'' Isn't French great?) Based in Brussels to the extent that it's based anywhere.

There's a Local Committee at UB.

AIFETA
L'association des infirmières françaises entérostoma-thérapeutes d'Aquitaine. `The association of French enterostomal-therapist nurses of Aquitaine.' (Of course.)

AIFF
Audio Interchange File Format.

AIFS
Australian Institute of Family Studies.

AIG
The American Institute of Guitar. ``Founded in 1975 ... devoted to furthering the knowledge and appreciation of the guitar and music.'' Other links at the guitar entry.

AIG
American International Group. A financial services and insurance group. Some of the financial services are a form of insurance: credit default swaps, to name an infamous example.

AIG
Arrogance, Incompetence, and Greed. Alternate expansion for the AIG that has been the American International Group.

AIG
Association of Inspectors General. A US nonprofit that ``consists of Inspectors General and professional staff in their agencies, as well as other officials responsible for inspection and oversight with respect to public, not-for-profit, and independent sector organizations.''

AIH
American Institute of Homeopathy. Homeopathy is basically hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you therapy, except that the hair is cut down to sub-atomic dimensions (take one), and all of the cutting is done with a rusty hacksaw.

AIH
Artificial Insemination Homologous. Artificial insemination with the partner's own sperm.

AIHA
American Industrial Hygiene Association. Cf. ACGIH, AIHce.

AIHA
American International Health Alliance. It ``advances global health through volunteer-driven, `twinning' partnerships and other programs that mobilize communities to better address healthcare priorities, while improving productivity and quality of care.

AIHA's twinning partnerships are defined by a formal agreement held between US healthcare providers and their counterparts overseas, who work collaboratively to develop a detailed workplan that outlines their goals, specifying how they will achieve them over a period of time, primarily through the exchange of information and skills.''

AIHA
AutoImmune Hemolytic Anemia. Disease in which the immune system decides to destroy your red blood cells.

AIHC
American Industrial Health Council. Lobbies for the health of industry.

AIHce
American Industrial Hygiene Conference and Exposition. Co-sponsored by AIHA and ACGIH.

AIHP
American Institute of the History of Pharmacy.

AIHP, AIHP / IAHP
Association Internationale d'Histoire de la Psychanalyse. English: `International Association for the History of Psychoanalysis.'

AIHV
Association Internationale pour l'Histoire du Verre. ``We are an international organisation devoted to advancing knowledge about glass - its use, history and aesthetic qualities from antiquity to present times. We hold a congress every three years and publish the papers that are given in the series Annales de l'AIHV.''

AII
This letter sequence is unlikely to occur at the beginning of the name of a for-profit organization. Cf. AIIA, AIIM, and AIIP below.

AIIA
Australian Information Industry Association.

Aiiiii!
Sound produced, say, by the open mouth of a person falling and aware of it. There are variants. It does sort of suggest the Doppler shift perceived in the (p)reference frame of someone at a fixed height above the faller.

AIIM
The Association for Information and Image Management.

AIINB
Association des Infirmières et Infirmiers du Nouveau-Brunswick. In English: Nurses Association of New Brunswick (NANB). You can probably guess that's New Brunswick, Canada, not New Brunswick, New Jersey.

AIIP
The Association of Independent Information Professionals.

AIIS
American Institute of Indian Studies.

AIJ
Activities Implemented Jointly (to cut greenhouse gases). See JI.

AIJAC
Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.

AILA
American Indian Library Association. ``[A]n affiliate of the American Library Association, [it] is a membership action group that addresses the library-related needs of American Indians and Alaska Natives. AILA holds business meetings twice a year in conjunction with the American Library Association and publishes the American Indian Libraries Newsletter quarterly.''

AILA
Association des Infirmiers Libéraux d'Auvergne. French, `Association of Independent Nurses of Auvergne.'

AILA
Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée. `International Association for Applied Linguistics.' Founded in France in 1964. Has held an international meeting in a different country every three years since 1969. Different country from that of the preceding couple of meetings, anyway. In Spanish, Asociación Internacional de Lingüística Aplicada.

AILVC
Association des interprètes en langage visuel du Canada. If you want to see one possible result of translating this from French into langage visuel and then from Visual Language into English, see AVLIC. You know, we wouldn't have all these interpretation problems if everyone would simply speak or sign (whichever is more convenient) only Italian.

AIM
Administrators in Internal Medicine. ``The national organization of business administrators in departments of internal medicine at medical schools and academic health centers.'' This AIM is part of AAIM.

Take care not to confuse this with AIM (below).

AIM
Administrators In Medicine. ``National Organization for State Medical & Osteopathic Board Executive Directors.''

Take care not to confuse this with AIM (above).

AIM
Adsorption Isotherm Measurement[s].

AIM
Alcohol In Moderation. The name of a student organization at Siene College.

AIM
Ambulatory Information Management Association. A professional organization that apparently preferred AIM. Well, you know what happens. ``For want of a nail, the shoe was lost...'' and so on. They used to have the domain <aim4.org>, but now that belongs to ``Aim 4 Health,'' a vitamin-supplement store.

AIM
American Indian Movement. The acronym is useful, because ``American Indian'' is now politically incorrect for ``Native American'' in some circles. The thing to do is use the term ``American Autochthon.'' Keep 'em off-balance.

AIM
ATM Inverse Multiplexer. Sometimes I wonder if that isn't where all the money goes.

AIM
Automatic Identification Manufacturers. A trade association for the automatic data collection (ADC) industry.

AIMA
Alternative Investment Management Association, Ltd. Is that like ``alternative medicine''? Oh, here we go: ``The Global, Not-for-Profit Trade Association for Hedge Funds, Managed Futures and Managed Currency Funds.'' Founded in 1990.

AIMA
Associazione Italiana Malattia di Alzheimer. `Italian Alzheimer's Disease Association.'

AIMBE
American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. A member society of the AAES.

AIMBI
Australian Institute of Medical and Biological Illustrators. For when hentai gets really graphic. No-no, just kidding.

AIME
American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers. Founded as the American Institute of Mining Engineers in 1871, by 22 mining engineers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. A member society of the AAES.

AIME comprises five separately incorporated units: an AIME Institute Headquarters, and four Member Societies:

I'm not sure where WAAIME squeezes into the organization chart.

AIST is the one of the four Member Societies which has changed its mission the least, and it is the only one which changed its initialism (from ISS). Two other Member Societies, like the umbrella organization, have changed their names and kept their initialisms. They might have considered alternatives. Like WLU, they could have renamed themselves after somebody with appropriate initials. TMS, for example, could have renamed itself the Tom Mix Society. Not only does this avoid using the initial of the as part of the official initialism, but it's a memorable name. The best part, though, is that TMS doesn't have to change its name each time it wants to change its focus, because the name is always as appropriate as it ever was.

AIME's web presence is slightly confusing. It was a little slow off the blocks, and its earliest official presence on the web was a page hosted by TMS. They must have been ticked off to learn that the Information-Media AIME had gotten to <aime.org> first. They evidently started out using <aimeny.org> (AIME is organized as a New York State nonprofit corporation, though its offices are in Littleton, Colorado). Links from older pages (including the no-longer-updated TMS-hosted page) tend to be to the aimeny address, though now AIME itself seems to prefer the <aimehq.org> domain name. As of May 2004, URL's with aimehq and aimeny seem to be equivalent. Lessons learned: (1) buy your domain name early, (2) think through what domain name you'll be happy with in the long term, and (3) switch web locations as infrequently as possible.

AIME
Association for Information Media and Equipment ``assists producers of information film, video, interactive technologies, computer software and equipment for educational and information.''

AIML
All India Muslim League. Founded in Dacca, Bengal, in 1906, when ``India' was a British possession including present-day Burma, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the piece of Kashmir that China bit off in the 1962 Sino-Indian war. (Ceylon, now called Sri Lanka, was administered separately from India throughout the period of British rule.) Burma was split off administratively before India became independent, and when India became independent it was partitioned into an India and Pakistan (q.v.). The latter, an explicitly Muslim country, consisted of provinces in two separate clusters, to the northeast and northwest of India. In the third Indo-Pakistani war, India helped East Pakistan become independent (as Bangladesh) of West Pakistan.

In English today, I think Bengal (which Bengolis that I know pronounce ``Bengol'') generally refers to the Indian state of Bengal that is adjacent to Bangladesh, while the part of old Bengal that is in Bangladesh is simply Bangladesh. So the ``Dacca, Bengal'' where the AIML was founded in 1906 is ``Dhaka, Bangladesh'' in 2003.

The AIML became increasingly irrelevant from the founding of Pakistan on, and petered out of existence around 1958. It has no genetic or really ideological relationship to other subcontinent organizations that have included the phrase ``Muslim League'' in their name.

AIMS
Abnormal Involuntary Movement Scale.

AIMS
Amusement Industry Manufacturers & Suppliers.

AIMS
Arizona Instrument to Measure (education) Standards. Statewide in Spring 2004, about 60% of students failed the math portion and about 40% failed the reading and writing portions. A passing grade on all sections (by senior year, I suppose) is required for graduation.

AIMS
Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services.

AIMS
Australian Institute of Medical Scientists.

AIN
Advanced Intelligent Network.

AIN
American Institute of Nutrition. Founded in 1928. Now it's the ASNS.

Ain
Epsilon Tauri. The second eye of the bull (not the second bull's-eye). A/k/a Oculus Boreus. The name Ain is Arabic, which I don't know and which is inconvenient to read. In Hebrew, ayin means `eye.'

AINA
Assyrian International News Agency.

A in B
Automobile IN Basement.

AINR
Associazione Italiana di Neuroradiologia.

Ainu
Ainu is an Ainu word meaning `human being.'

AIO
Asynchronous Input/Output.

AIOC
Azerbaijan International Oil Consortium.

[column]

aion
Ancient Greek word meaning `age' (written with an acute-accented omega). This was Latinized as aeon and borrowed into English, where it is now often spelled eon (especially in the US).

[column]

A.I.O.N., AION
Annali dell'Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli. The most direct and literal translation of this is `Annals of the Eastern University Institute of Naples,' but the university name is never normally given this way. It just happens that Istituto Universitario is an Italian term that means `University.' (To be pedantic, it would have to be `university institute,' but the absence of an adjective form of the English word university presents a problem. The English phrase university institute is likely to be understood as an institute that is part of a university. What the Italian phrase means, casting aside any attempt at grace, is something like `university-type institute': an institute of the university type. We usually call that a university.)

Anyway, Istituto Universitario Orientale (Napoli) and closely similar names seem to have been superseded -- I would guess around the beginning of the twenty-first century. The university's domain name is <iuo.it>, but the formal name is apparently now Università degli Studi di Napoli ``l'Orientale.'' This follows a naming pattern that is not uncommon for public universities in Italy. Others on this pattern: Università degli Studi di Roma ``La Sapienza,'' and Università degli Studi di Napoli ``Parthenope.'' As you can probably guess, Università degli Studi is an Italian term meaning `University.' (Another one is Università.) Not to worry, though: the school acronym is UNO.

Incidentally, the journal AION is published in two sections, each with one issue annually. The sezione linguistica ``[a]ims to publish articles concerning history of language and ancient languages, bibliographies, reviews, evidences of disappeared languages, connections between linguistic habits and feeding habits, enumeration, anthropology and other in (`ancient') Mediterranean area.'' The sezione filologico-letteraria is ``[c]oncerned with the history of Greek and Latin literature, but also generally with the history of ancient culture in all its aspects (religion, philosophy, law, politics, poetics, rhetoric, science).''

AION
Anterior Ischemic Optic Neuropathy. An ischemia is a local blood shortage. ``Local'' in the sense of being limited to a particular body region, organ, or tissue. It typically arises from a problem in a particular blood vessel -- vasoconstriction, thrombosis, or embolism. It can also be caused by arteritis -- inflamation of an artery. Two kinds of AION are distinguished: Arteric AION and Non-arteric AION (NAION).

AIOP
Accademia Italiana di Odontoiatria Protesica. `Italian Academy of Prosthetic Dentistry.' Despite the funny name, they're welcome at meetings of other national academies of aesthetic or esthetic or cosmetic dentistry. If the P stood for ``pelvic,'' I imagine there would be greater uneasiness.

AIP
American Institute of Philanthropy. They publish a Rating Guide. In 2003, the US Supreme Court hears a case brought by the Illinois Attorney General against Telemarketing Associates, a professional phone solicitor of an AIP F-rated charity, Vietnow. Telemarketing Associates does not deny that it keeps 85% of the charitable contributions it wangles and has been doing so for years, but argues that their callers don't explicitly claim that more than a small fraction of the money is telemarketer revenue (as it is) and that (according to certain court rulings of the 1980's) the states are forbidden to regulate this cousin to usury (not their words).

AIP
American Institute of Physics. Tunnel through cyberspace to their homepage.

AIP
American Institute of Pyrotartology. Experiments have to be repeatable, you know, or it's not Science. By this measure, the SPT experiment is very scientific.

AIP
Application Infrastructure Provider. An AIP supplies application providers with all of the infrastructure and systems management necessary to deliver the services of their software.

AIP
Association of Internet Professionals. Just to prove how on the bleeding edge they are, they got the domain name <association.org>. I'm impressed.

AIP
Associazione Italiana Parkinsoniani.

AIP
ATM Interface Processor.

[column]

AIP
L'Association Internationale de Papyrologues.

AIPLA
American Intellectual Property Law Association.

AIPO
American Institute of Public Opinion. Founded at Princeton, NJ, by George Gallup in 1935. Gallup became famous, even eponymous, in this line of work, and his organization is now known by his name. (It's listed at our list of pollsters.)

Gallup originally taught journalism at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, and then Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. This was typical of the early pollsters -- they generally didn't have backgrounds in the social sciences. In 1932 he had been hired by an NYC advertising firm to conduct marketing surveys.

In starting out on his own, Gallup got AIPO going by making a famous two-part bet with its customers, the newspapers. He would provide regular public opinion survey results on various questions leading up to the next election (1936), including a prediction of how the election would turn out. The first part of the bet was, he would refund the syndication fees paid by the newspapers if he predicted the wrong winner of the presidential election.

In retrospect, you probably think this part of the bet was pretty easy: FDR was the only president to win election four times; he was a stupendously popular president; in the midst of the Great Depression, people would favor tax-and-spend policies to pick up the economy, etc. (``Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect'' in the original formulation of Harry Hopkins). Well no, not really. It had been four years since FDR had been elected, and the depression was worse than when he had taken office. The economy never really picked up until the US entered WWII. As FDR would say then, ``Doctor New Deal'' was fired and ``Doctor Win the War'' had taken his place.

Anyway, it wasn't all so obvious when history was being made rather than written. A popular magazine of that day, Literary Digest, ran an enormous survey with an unblemished record of predicting the winner of the presidential election. For the 1936 election, ten million postcards were sent out. With a response rate of 20%, the prediction was that Republican challenger Alfred Landon would win handily (60% of the vote). The problem was that the addresses came from automobile registration lists and telephone directories. They were a nonrepresentative sample, skewed toward those well-enough off financially to afford a car or a phone (not so common in those days). In previous elections that Literary Digest had predicted, the nonrepresentative sampling was not a big problem, because rich and poor voted similarly. Recall that in 1932, Republican President Herbert Hoover was contemplating large relief expenditures, and FDR was campaigning with a balanced-budget platform. By 1936, on the other hand, FDR did not look conservative, and those who were well off were more likely to strongly oppose his activist, essentially socialist program.

The main lesson normally drawn from LD's failure was that large biased samples are worse than small representative samples. That is certainly true as far as it goes, but there are many different sources of bias (about which more when I continue the entry).

In 1948 it was George Gallup's turn to screw up. Two weeks before the election, his polling showed Dewey strongly ahead, and he stopped polling. People changed their minds. It doesn't take two weeks either. In 1980, Carter and Reagan were close until the weekend before election day. Unpublicized tracking polls of the campaigns confirmed what the election proved: a shift to Reagan in the last two days, and a landslide Republican victory.

AIPS
Astronomical Image Processing System.

AIR
Additive Increase Rate.

AIR
Airborne Imaging Radar. [NASAnese.]

air
AIR rifle. You know -- the Olympic sporting event! It's a sport! Just because it involves a machine doesn't mean you don't have to train and be in shape. It's a skill. Next Olympics, let's have formula-one as a demonstration sport. And bowling is waaaaaaay overdue. Let's make it a Winter sport.

AIR
All India Radio.

AIR, A.I.R.
American Industrial Real Estate Association. An association of real estate associates and brokers, founded in 1960. It seems that over time they have shifted emphasis from specifically industrial to general commercial properties, so it now uses its old acronymic name as a fossil: ``AIR Commercial Real Estate Association.'' An affiliate of the NAR.

AIR
American Institutes for Research. A nonprofit founded in 1946, it ``is one of the largest behavioral and social science research organizations in the world. Our overriding goal is to use the best science [huh? didn't they say behavioral and social science?] available to bring the most effective ideas and approaches to enhancing everyday life. For us, making the world a better place is not wishful thinking. It is the goal that drives us.''

AIR
Annals of Improbable Research. Two ens. Cf. JIR.

AIR
Association for Institutional Research. ``Institutional Research'' (IR) specifically into the administration of post-secondary education. It's hot.

AIR
The Association of Irish Racecourses.

AIR
Australian Institute of Radiography.

air
The Indonesian noun meaning `water.' I, for one, think that's pretty cool. Of course, it's not pronounced the same as English air. And so naturally, it's not a homophone of English heir or ere, either. This points up one of the great flaws of Indonesian and so many other languages: phonetic spelling. When two totally different words are pronounced identically in the Indonesian language, they have to be spelled exactly the same way. This identical spelling leads to confusion. What a disaster!

Interestingly, the phrase tanah air, literally `ground water' or `land water' or something, depending on how you want to misunderstand it, means `native land' or `fatherland.'

The Indonesian word udara means `air' (substance and, so to speak, location). With a thick Indonesian accent, the English word water might sound a bit like udara, but I guess I wouldn't push the similarity. Cf. liar.

air bridge
In microelectronics, this is a structure (typically a metal interconnect) suspended above a solid surface (i.e., not lying directly on top of and in contact with it). Our more complete discussion of the air bridge is at the entry for its standard abbreviation, AB.

AIRC
The American Institute for Roman Culture.

``Founded in order to promote and defend the heritage of Rome, the American Institute for Roman Culture (IRC), an American 501(c)3 non-profit organization active in Rome, is dedicated to heightening the English-speaking public's understanding and appreciation of Rome's cultural heritage through a variety of long-term educational programs, exhibits, publications, and other scholarly projects.

Whereas pre-existing programs appeal to restrictive demographics and have only a transitory presence in Rome, the IRC, deeply-rooted in the academic communities of both Rome and the United States, will appeal to, teach, and inspire a broader demographic of students, scholars, and educated laypeople. Through a dynamic, interdisciplinary approach the Institute will enable its participants to have a visible and lasting effect on Rome's cultural heritage.''

The group has a dig going at the Roman forum, led by archaeologist Darius Arya, who is also the director and a co-founder of AIRC. Darius A. Arya's father is Sirous Arya.

When the Vatican first censored the (Jewish) Talmud in Italy, and forbade the publication of at least one volume, its censor also required certain changes in the books allowed to be published. In particular, references to Rome were relocated to Persia.

AIREA
Less-used acronym for American Industrial Real Estate Association (officially A.I.R.). Those who use this expansion appear to be disproportionately liable to misremember the expansion as ``American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers.''

Air Force One
A star vehicle for Harrison Ford; a movie made and released during the interwar decade. Bridging as it did the peacetime cold war with the Russians and the peacetime war with terrorists, it involves Russian terrorists who hijack Air Force One as it flies from Russia to the US.

Air Force One
The radio call sign of any US Air Force plane the US president is aboard. In common parlance it is the name of an Air Force plane specially adapted for the US president. As of 2005, there are two such planes: specially configured Boeing 747-200B's with Air Force designation VC-25A, tail numbers 28000 and 29000. (Previous presidential planes had tail numbers 27000, 26000, etc.)

The planes project a picture of presidential power, privilege, perquisites, and prestige. (No, not really -- I just say that because I like alliteration.) The well-known name has been borrowed for a movie and is the basis for various puns, including other leaders' planes and a hugely successful athletic shoe from Nike named Air Force 1 (not to mention a rap song about the shoe). Plane names punning on Air Force One include Prayer Force One (discussed somewhere in the Victoria Day entry) and Blair Force One.

air guitar
An imaginary friend of the guitar persuasion. Never needs tuning.

There's an Air Guitar World Championship held annually in Oulu, in northern Finland. (How far north? It's at the Arctic Circle.)

There are various national championships, including US Air Guitar. (On August 16, 2007, 14 regional champions and the defending national champion Hot Lixx Hulahan competed for the national championship in NYC; local favorite Andrew ``William Ocean'' Litz won. His performance closes with a spectacular backflip onto an empty beer can, but he only placed 11th at the world championship.) The world competition finalists are mostly national champions (15 in September 2007), along with some dark horses (``black horses'') who enter through a qualifying round (4 in 2007), and the reigning champion.

Ochi ``Dainoji'' Yousuke won both the 11th and 12th championships (2006 and 2007). In 2007, Dainoji received a custom-made Flying Finn electric guitar worth $3,400. For a sort of air guitar that is expensive and more substantial in se, see the discussion of silent guitars at the backboard entry.

This reminds me of pop stars like Britney Spears and Ashlee Simpson, who have largely abandoned the pretense that they're singing live rather than lip-syncing. Ashlee is mentioned s.v. Autobiography. See also As Time Goes By.

AIS
Acción Internacional por la Salud. Literally `International Action for Health.' Used as the Spanish for HAI, q.v.

AIS
Adhesive Interconnect System.

AIS
Alarm Indication Signal.

AIS
American Institute of Stress.

Turn off the sound! Turn off the sound! Exit the homepage! Ahhh.

AIS
Association for Information Systems. A new organization. Here are papers from its second annual ``Americas Conference'' (1996).

AIS
Atom Inelastic Scattering.

AIS
Australian Institute of Sport.

AIS
Automated Information System.

[Phone icon]

AIS
Automatic Intercept System. The name of an early (1960's-era) system (for all I know the name is used still) that intercepts calls to changed numbers. ``The number you have reached ....'' A web search on the key phrases turns up a bunch of old jokes.

AISBM
American Institute of Service Body Manufacturers. At a guess, it seems that service bodies are the bodies of commercial trucks. The AISBM's ``purpose is to maintain an effective working relationship with the truck chassis manufacturers and to keep the truck equipment industry informed on relevant engineering matters pertaining to service bodies.'' The AISBM has been an NTEA affiliate since 1979.

AISC
American Institute of Steel Construction.

AIS-E
Alarm Indication Signal -- External.

AISES
American Indian Science and Engineering Society. A member society of the AAES.

``[A] national, nonprofit organization which nurtures building of community by bridging science and technology with traditional Native values. Through its educational programs, AISES provides opportunities for American Indians and Native Alaskans to pursue studies in science, engineering, and technology arenas. The trained professionals then become technologically informed leaders within the Indian community. AISES' ultimate goal is to be a catalyst for the advancement of American Indians and Native Alaskans as they seek to become self-reliant and self-determined members of society.''

The code of ethics ``prohibits the use or possession of any alcohol'' and applies inter alia ``when an individual is representing AISES in an official capacity''

AISI
American Iron and Steel Institute.

AISIANMTU
And I Swear I Am Not Making This Up. This isn't really an abbreviation in spirit. This is just an inside joke.

AIS-L
Alarm Indication Signal -- Line.

AIS LAC
Acción Internacional por la Salud en Latinoamérica y el Caribe. Spanish for HAI Latin America. The expansion given at the beginning of the entry is a guess after the word Salud. I haven't seen anything on the web that expands the full ``AIS LAC.'' See LAC for a thought on that.

Apparently these NGO's are not all buddy-buddy. On Columbus Day 2004, AIS LAC proposed that WHO investigate PAHO because the influence of the US is weaker in WHO than in PAHO. (Not their precise wording.) AIS cooperates closely with WHO.

AISM
Association Internationale de Signalisation Maritime. English IALA.

AISNA, A.I.S.N.A.
Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani. `Italian Association for North American Studies.' AISNA is a constituent association of the EAAS, and the only one besides SANAS with ``North American'' in its (English) name. ``North America''! Finally Mexico will get the attention it deserves!

You know, it's going to take a long time to read this glossary straight through as you had originally planned. Why don't you jump ahead now to the ID entry?

AIS-P
Alarm Indication Signal -- Path.

AISS
Association Internationale de la Science du Sol. French name of the International Society of Soil Science -- IBG in German, ISSS (main entry here) in English, SICS in Spanish.

AIST
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, part of Japan's MITI, runs eight labs in Tsukuba, and seven elsewhere.

It used to be called the ``Agency of Industrial Science and Technology.'' I recommend changing the name once again.

AIST
Association for Iron & Steel Technology. Formed in January 2004 from the merger of the Iron and Steel Society (ISS) and the Association of Iron and Steel Engineers. The ISS was and the AIST is a Member Society of AIME.

AIS-V
Alarm Indication Signal -- Virtual (tributary).

AIT
Assembly, Integration and Testing.

AIT
Atmospheric Interceptor Technolog{y|ies}. For ballistic missile defense.

AIT
Atomic International Time.

AIT
Automatic Identification Technology.

AITA
Oh, you mean ``L'Association internationale des transporteurs aériens -- IATA.

aitch
The name of the eighth letter of the English alphabet (``H'' and ``h''). (It was at the same position in the Latin alphabet, once the letter gee was introduced, but there is a theory that the Romans didn't count their letters starting at A.) The head term gives the standard spelling, but in some work of Noah Webster, probably The American Spelling Book, I remember that he used the alternate spelling: aytch.

aitch-bar
The way one reads aloud the symbol representing what is sometimes called Dirac's constant or the reduced Planck's constant: Planck's constant (h) divided by two pi. When the symbol is not available, people often write ``hbar'' or ``h-bar.'' We have an entry about hbar in HTML.

AITJ
Association of Indiana Teachers of Japanese. An affiliate of the NCJLT.

AITLC
The Access Indiana Teaching & Learning Center.

AIU
American InterContinental University. I don't need to put a link here. If you surf the web long enough, one of their ads is bound to pop up. ``Earn an MBA in just 8 months.'' This isn't like a diploma mill, where they just sell you a degree for money. Dang! They're accredited by Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Please don't confuse this university with that other AIU. There is nothing meretricious about this school. Former Oval Officer Bill Clinton gave the commencement address at AIU's Dubai campus. He probably gave a discount off his usual fee, since AIU Online participated in a federal study.

There's also Richmond University, the ``American International University'' in London. The name reminds me of the movie An American Werewolf in London (1981). By 1997, they decided to milk this idea again -- bring it back from the dead, as it were. The remake was An American Werewolf in Paris. That in turn reminds me of The Picture of Dorian Grey.

Sir Thomas, speaking on America, says ``I have travelled all over it, in cars provided by the directors, who in such matters, are extremely civil. I assure you that it is an education to visit it.''
    ``But must we really see Chicago in order to be educated?'' asked Mr. Erskine plaintively. ``I don't feel up to the journey.''
    Sir Thomas waved his hand. ``Mr. Erskine of Treadley has the world on his shelves. We practical men like to see things, not to read about them. The Americans are an extremely interesting people. I assure you there is no nonsense about Americans.''
    ``How dreadful!'' cried Lord Henry. ``I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.''

Hmm, now where was I? Oh! That wasn't the passage! This is:

    ``Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered,'' said Mr. Erskine. ``I myself would say that it had merely been detected.''
    ``Oh! but I have seen specimens of the inhabitants,'' answered the Duchess, vaguely. ``Must confess that most of them are extremely pretty. And they dress well, too. They get all their dresses in Paris. I wish I could afford to do the same.''
    ``They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,'' chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes.

I think Wilde liked that mot about Paris so much that he used it in a couple of plays (but I can't find the other instance, off-hand). Not to be gratuitously chiastic or anything, but to judge from a couple of world wars, it seems that when good Americans go to Paris, a lot of them die.

In Dik Browne's Hagar the Horrible strip of (I think) December 3, 1993, a friar warns Hagar and the stupid fellow with the funnel for a hat, ``If you don't mend your sinful ways, you will go where all sinners go.'' Enthused, they reply as one: ``Paris?!''

David Plante, epitomizing a passage of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, in which Svidrigailov commits suicide in the office of Achilles, explains: ``America is the place a Russian goes to when he commits suicide.'' [See p. 33 in his article ``Under Eastern Eyes: What America Meant to the Writers of Russia,'' article in NYTimes Book Review, pp. 3ff, Feb. 27, 1994. Plante had been a lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow.] I probably ought to say something here about the options finally open to Misha Karamazov.

AIU
Analog Interface Unit.

AIU
Atlantic Internetional University. ``A New Age for Distance Learning.'' Oh wait -- I misread that. It's ``International.''

``By recognizing the knowledge gained in both school and `Life Experience' settings, AIU is able to grant degrees reflective of the student's true academic status.'' Elsewhere: ``[t]he student's Academic Status defines the number of Credit Hours the University will grant towards the selected degree program.''

``ATLANTIC INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY IS NOT ACCREDITED BY AN ACCREDITING AGENCY RECOGNIZED BY THE UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF EDUCATION.'' On this page they explain why that's okay.

They have faculty!

AIUI
As I Understand It.

AIUM
American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine.

AIV
An Inclusive Version. An altered version, in the domestic-animal sense of ``altered,'' of the New Testament and Psalms (from the O.T.). Too bad they didn't do the book of Ruth or the story of Onan and Tamar; a neutered version of those might be interesting. Also, because ``the blind'' is so offensive, these differently abled persons are referred to in AIV by the inoffensive expression ``people who are blind.'' God save us from those blind ``people who are idiotic.'' Tell it to the ``people who are Egyptian.''

One day in high school I was in the Math Resource Center waiting to ask Miss Chew a question, and the blind student (we only had one, and I've forgotten his name) was there too. We exchanged small talk, and I thoughtlessly used some sight-related metaphor (something like ``looks that way'' for something that could as well have been ``seems that way,'' say), and he said ``I wouldn't know.'' It was a joke, okay? Blind people -- people who are blind, the blind, the quite-differently-sighted, the non-sighted -- they're rather aware of their difference. I have to add this: Frederick Douglass is reported to have said, ``Mr. Lincoln is the only white man with whom I have ever talked, or in whose presence I have ever been, who did not consciously or unconsciously betray to me that he recognized my color.''

AIVD
Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst. Dutch `General Intelligence and Security Service.' Successor (the homepage says simply that it's the new name) of the charmingly-named BVD.

AIV method
Artturi Ilmari Virtanen METHOD. The only thing (not person) I can think of that is known by three initials of one person's name. Off hand, the only thing I can think of that uses two initials of one name is CBS (Charles Bonnet Syndrome), though I'm sure there are others.

The AIV method is the long-term storage of leguminous fodder in an acid medium, in order to preserve protein content. ``Long-term'' probably means the duration of a Finnish winter, which I think is almost a decade (okay, in dog years). In experiments he conducted in the 1920's, he used a dilute solution of hydrochloric and sulfuric acids, and found that this worked if kept in a narrow pH range around 4. This work won him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1945.

AIVP
Association Internationale Villes & Ports. `International Association Cities & Ports' in French. You need a preposition? Try `International Cities & Ports Association.'

AIWM
Association of International Wealth Management.

Aix
Aix en Provence was the childhood home of Émile Zola and Paul Cézanne, school chums. Cézanne lived there as an adult, but Zola was a poor orphan and so was forced to go to Paris and invent the practice of aggressive book-marketing (later invented independently in the US by Carly's father, a co-founder of Simon and Schuster, who was also orphaned). From this example we see the evil that can come of a deprived childhood.

AIX
Advanced Interactive eXecutive. (Trademark IBM.) Uncannily similar to Unix. An ``Open Systems'' (vide OSF) OS. There's a USENET FAQ set archived for the web.

AIX
ArmanI Exchange. I read this on a sweater; AIX (with the I larger: AIX) on the chest and the expansion twisting around the sleeves. The wearer was even less stylish than the sweater.

AIX/ESA
Advanced Interactive eXecutive for ESA. (Trademark IBM.) AIX for IBM System/390 or or large server hardware.

AIX/6000
Advanced Interactive eXecutive for RS-6000. (Trademark IBM.)

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A.J., AJ
Antiquitates Judaicae. Latin title of a first-century work by Flavius Josephus, written in Koine (a/k/a New Testament Greek -- the international language of the eastern Mediterranean in those centuries), normally known by its Latin title or an often faux-ami modern translation of that title: `Jewish Antiquities' in English, Les antiquités juives in French, Las Antigüedades Judías in Spanish, etc. It's not about antique furniture or other collectibles. It's just a history of the Jews up to the time preceding the rebellion against Rome in which Josephus was a general.

For the first 1500 or so years after it was written, the title would have been Antiqvitates Ivdaicae. It is conventional among Latinists in North America to write the vocalic vee as a yoo, but not to convert the consonantal ``i'' into the modern letter jay.

AJ
Astronomical Journal. Founded in 1849 by B.A. Gould. Sponsored by the AAS. One of the major journals in the field. Cf. ApJ.

Monthly.
ISSN: 0004-6256

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AJA
American Journal of Archaeology. Based in Boston. Here's a separate site specifically for the book reviews.

AJA
American Journal on Addictions. The official Journal of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. Why did I include this entry? I couldn't stop myself.

AJA
American[s] of Japanese Ancestry.

AJA
And Justice for All. It was ``founded in mid-1995 to fight for equality for everyone without regard to sexual orientation. AJA seeks to achieve this goal by increasing the visibility and participation of heterosexuals in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights movement.''

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AJAH
American Journal of Ancient History. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.

AJALT
Association for Japanese-Language Teaching.

AJBA
Australian Journal of Biblical Archaeology.

AJC
African Jewish Congress.

AJC
American Jewish Committee. A ``secular'' organization in the sense of not being affiliated with any particular religious stream within Judaism. The AJC publishes Commentary, which under editorship of Norman Podhoretz, from 1960 or so to maybe 1995, was one of the leading neoconservative publications.

A different organization than the AJ Congress (infra).

AJC
American Jewish Congress. Not affiliated with any particular religious stream within Judaism, but it couldn't number but a few confused Orthodox in its membership. Its mission statement runs into lists and subparagraphs. About as far to the left as the AJ Committee (supra) is to the right.

AJC, AJ-C
Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

AJCU
The Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (in the US). There are 28 Jesuit (SJ) colleges and universities in the US. Corresponding Latin-American organization is AUSJAL.

AJG
Association of Japanese Geographers. (If you want to do more than view their nameplate gif, you ought to come equipped with a Japanese-capable browser.)

AJHS
American Jewish Historical Society. Headquartered at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. Has a research center in Waltham, Massachusetts, adjacent to the campus of Brandeis University.

AJL
Association of Jewish Libraries.

You know, things have calmed down a little bit since the Middle Ages, but there's still a lot of rivalry between religions (better that than ribaldry between the religions, I guess). In one town with a bad case of ecumenical rivalry, the Catholics got together a fund and bought their priest a Rolls Royce! When he went to pick it up, there was a big ceremony and the priest sprinkled his new car with holy water. It was very spiritual and inspiring. Envy-inspiring. I mean, coveting your neighbor's wife is out of bounds, but it doesn't say anything in there specifically about cars, now does it? No. The Jews of the town, not to be outdone, got a fund together and bought their rabbi a Rolls Royce too. He was very happy with it, but his congregants said unto him, ``the priest sprinkled holy water on his car. Aren't you gonna do anything?'' So the rabbi got a chain saw and lopped off a fender.

My cousin Victoria told me this one, and when she got to the punch line I sagged. She screamed at Pam -- ``He got it! He got it!'' It turns out not everyone gets it. Here's a hint: shortly after birth, Roman Catholics have their babies baptized with holy water. (That's shortly after their children's birth.) Eight days or so after their boys are born, Jews have them circumcised. (Just as a technical matter of fact, it's the father's responsibility to circumcise his sons, but it's universally regarded as a Very Good IdeaTM if a professional performs the operation.)

Okay, stop me if you've heard this one. It's from Sholom Aleichem's ``Fiddler on the Roof.'' The young man asks the rabbi, ``Rabbi, is it true that there's a blessing for everything?''

Yes, my son, we have a blessing for everything.

Even for the Tsar?

Yes, my son:
May the Lord bless and keep the Tsar ...
far away from us.

Technically, the fellow who performs circumcisions is a moel. He need not be a rabbi. In countries with few Jews, the moel usually holds a day job in a medical profession.

Three mothers in Florida are bragging to each other about their sons. Mother number one talks about her son the lawyer. On and on. Mother number two can't wait to go on about her son the doctor. After they've had their turns, they notice that mother number three is silent. And what does her son do? He's a rabbi. ``A rabbi!? What kind of job is that for a nice Jewish boy?''

The fellow who checks that the laws of kashrut (the dietary laws) are obeyed -- the kitchen inspector -- is called a meshgiach. Once I showed up very early for the Bar Mitzvah of a friend's son. The caterers were still unloading the reception meal from the truck. When the rabbi arrived, he greeted me and gave me a meaningful look. The meaning of the look was ``what are you doing here?'' I explained that I was early for the Bar Mitzvah, so he said ``in that case, why don't you go next door and tell them you're the food taster?'' It was a joke. I laughed and said ``I'll tell them I'm the meshgiach!'' It was a joke. He didn't laugh. It was a Reform synagogue, and later I found out that the food was ``kosher style.''

AJN
American Journal of Nursing. The official journal of the American Nursing Association. (See also the ANA's page.)

AJNR
American Journal of NeuroRadiology. Published by the ASNR.

AJP
American Journal of Pathology. Published by ASIP.

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AJP
American Journal of Philology. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.

AJP
American Journal of Physics. A publication of the AAPT (not the APS).

AJP
American Journal of Physiology. A publication of the APS (not this APS).

AJP
American Journal of Psychiatry. Official journal of the APA. So many AJP's -- I'm gonna go nuts!

AJP
American Journal of Psychotherapy. Founded in 1939, and was the early bird that got the <ajp.org> domain. Official journal of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, which doesn't have a separate organizational domain and seems to exist primarily to publish the AJP, and maybe to hold a conference so the proceedings can be published in the AJP. AJP is one of the core journals in its diffuse field.

AJP
American Justice Partnership. It sounds similar to ``American Justice League,'' but it's not a comic book series. It's an organization that advocates legal reform. They're particularly concerned with abuses in the civil justice system, including frivolous lawsuits, venue shopping, and inordinate compensatory damages for nonquantifiable losses. To a lot of businesspeople, I imagine that AJP must be the very picture of superheroes.

AJP
Australian Journal of Pharmacy. Interesting... You know, one rarely thinks of pharmacy as the name of an activity or abstract institution. Or as any kind of uncountable noun or !!! Oh my GOD -- it's a SWARM: AACP, AFPC, AIHP, AMCP, CAPSI... okay, enough of that. Seriously, most people are probably used to ``pharmacy'' primarily as a count noun, denoting a place of business where prescriptions are filled. The only common instance of pharmacy that might be uncountable is in the expression ``pharmacy school,'' but there the word is attributive, and it's not unusual for count nouns to be recruited as adjectives in this way (``Hamburger U,'' ``coat hanger,'' okay -- I'm working on a closer parallel). It's certainly useful to have pharmacy as an uncountable noun for, roughly, ``the profession of pharmacists,'' as distinguished from pharmacology, etc. But one wonders when this usage became common. One clue: the American Council on Pharmaceutical Education was founded in 1932 and -- certainly not prematurely -- changed its name to Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education in 2003. The ACPE Board of Directors approved the change in August of that year, and the following were given as the reasons:

AJPH
American Journal of Public Health.

AJPM
American Journal of Pain Management. A quarterly. The official journal of the AAPM. You should follow that link because we have a little bit of humor at that entry and, as you know, laughter is the best medicine (unless you've got a bruised rib or a broken jaw, in which case it might hurt; be careful you don't fall on the floor, either, or you might injure your ass).

AJPM
American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Official journal of ATPM and ACPM. An almost-monthly (increased from 8 to 10 issues per year for 2004.)

AJR
American Journalism Review. We're waiting for a serious one.

Seriously, I've read the hardcopy version, and they haven't a clue.

AJR
American Journal of Roentgenology. Published by the ARRS.

Roentgen was the fellow who discovered X-rays, which were also called Roentgen rays.

AJS
American Journal of Surgery. According to the website, visited February 2005: ``a peer-reviewed journal designed for the general surgeon who performs abdominal, cancer, vascular, head and neck, breast, colorectal, and other forms of surgery. AJS is the official journal of five major surgical societies [consolidation -- great! -- but did they have to publish with Elsevier Science?] and publishes their official papers as well as independently submitted clinical studies, editorials, reviews, brief reports, correspondence and book reviews.'' Elsevier is pronounced like ``el severe'' in English. Each letter e stands for expensive.

AJS
Association for Jewish Studies. Founded 1969, a constituent society of the ACLS since 1985. ACLS has an overview.

AJVR
American Journal of Veterinary Research. Its mission ``is to publish, in a timely manner, peer-reviewed reports of the highest-quality research that has the clear potential to enhance the health, welfare, and performance of animals and humans. The journal will maintain the highest ethical standards of scientific journalism and promote such standards among its contributors. In addition, the journal will foster global interdisciplinary cooperation in veterinary medical research.'' The AVMA also publishes the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA).

AK
Adenylate Kinase (E.C 2.7.4.3). A nucleotide phosphotransferase that catalyses the reaction MgATP + AMP --> MgADP + ADP.

AK
Alaska. USPS abbreviation.

The Villanova [University] Center for Information Law and Policy provides some links to state government web sites for Alaska. There's a page for Alaska from USACityLink.com, and here's a (self-described) Alaska Internet Travel Guide.

Here's a 405×480 map gif mirrored from <http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/multimedia/images/gif/a/alaska.gif>.

In Fairbanks, it doesn't get dark on the Fourth of July, so they don't bother with fireworks. They do set off fireworks for New Year's. (Yes, the latitude of Fairbanks is 64° 49', so it's a couple of degrees south of the Arctic Circle. Hence, around midnight the light levels resemble those a few minutes after sunset at the equator. For more of this, see the twilight entry. Barrow is at 71° 18'.) For other US coordinates, see this page.

AK
Alter Kakker. Yiddish in English transliteration (there are many alternative forms; Yiddish orthography itself was not standardized until 1938), `old shitter.' Even more uplifting knowledge can be found at the OF entry.

AKA
Above-Knee Amputation.

AKA, aka, a/k/a, a.k.a.
Also Known As. Typically used to introduce personal aliases. One of the abbreviations (abbrev.) that comments on itself.

AKC
American Kennel Club. ``Dedicated to Purebred Dogs and Responsible Dog Ownership Since 1884.''

AKDT
AlasKa Daylight Time. GMT-8. It's the ``Daylight Saving Time'' (DST) or ``Summer Time'' for all of Alaska save some islands. (See AKST for details, at least until we get an entry for Hawaii-Aleutian Time.) AKDT in 2009 is in effect from March 8 to October 31, for a total of 238 days. So summery! They should call AKDT the ``standard time'' and redesignate AKST ``winter time.'' Hmmm... same thing for the contiguous 48.

AKE
An old (1960's) telecommunications switching system from Ericsson, long ago superseded by AXE (q.v.).

AKI
Anti-Knock Index. Alternate name for the pump octane number (PON). Apparently a more common name for fuels with AKI or PON greater than 100.

Akita
A Japanese breed of dog. The kind that belonged to Nicole Brown Simpson when she was murdered in 1994. Blood on her dog's uninjured paws led to discovery of the murder. A port of northern Honshu. There is also an Akita University homepage.

Visit here for twenty-year-old apparitions, stigmata, crying-statue stuff.

Visit here for more on the dog breed.

There wasn't much on Akitas at Dmitri Gusev's O.J. Simpson Trial Center (OJ mentioned Nicole's dog in his statement to the LAPD) and just a decade later I notice that that site is down. Oh -- it was the trial of the twentieth century. For all you unrecovered OJ junkies, this metapage is probably as good a place to continue as any. Of its 17 OJ Trial links, one is still up and has relevant information. Then again, maybe it's time to move on to other injustices. See CJ.

Akiva
A rabbi martyred by Roman occupiers of Palestine after they put down the Bar Kokhba rebellion which he supported. Also written Aqiva.

Akld
AucKLanD, New Zealand.

AKM
Apogee Kick Motor. Usually a solid-propellant engine. Used in the final maneuver to transfer a satellite into a geostationary orbit (GEO, q.v.).

AKP
Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi. `Justice and Development Party' of Turkey. This translation is, as it seems, literal and word-for-word. The name the party prefers for itself is ``Ak Parti.'' (This and half-translated forms like `Ak Party' are also used internationally.) The party's preference is due to the fact that ak in Turkish means `clean' or `white.'

AKP is a moderate Islamist party led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It explicitly and firmly denies that it is Islamist, as it more-or-less must anyway since Turkish law that forbids the exploitation of religion for political ends. It describes itself as socially conservative. Be that as it may, some indeterminable part of its electoral strength is generally supposed to be due to the widespread belief that it is a moderate Islamist party.

There have been less moderate Islamist parties, and they have been popular, and they have been overthrown. The DP (Demokrat Parti) was the first not-so-secular party to contest a free election against the successors of Kemal Atatürk (see CHP). It won power in 1950 and lost it in a 1960 pro-CHP coup (which eventually saw the hanging of DP leader and PM Adnan Menderes and some of his ministers). The cycle was repeated a couple of times before the AKP was founded in 2001. The AKP won 44% of the vote in the 2002 elections, giving it an overwhelming majority in parliament.

Ak-Sar-Ben
NEBRASKA spelled backwards, with hyphens and capitalization for style. The name was created for an organization, ``The Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben'' that came together to provide family-friendly entertainment for visitors to the Nebraska State Fair in Omaha in 1895. The organization continued as an Omaha-area civic organization and is still in existence; it has a page that explains its history, so I don't have to. I asked Mary if she had heard of Ak-Sar-Ben and she said he's a terrorist.

AKST
AlasKa Standard Time. GMT-9. AKST and AKDT are used throughout the state of Alaska, except for the western-most Aleutian islands and St. Lawrence island, which are on Hawaii-Aleutian Time (GMT-10) and which do not observe Daylight-Saving Time (DST).

AKVMA
AlasKa State Veterinary Medical Association. See also AVMA.

AK-47
Automat Kalashnikova 1947. Invented by Mikhael Timovievitch Kalashnikov around the new 7.62 bullet he received in 1943. There are about fifty million in circulation today; it's the most popular gun ever made. I suppose that might make it the most unpopular gun ever made as well. You can learn more from an article in the June 1997 issue of Esquire. According to an article by Carleton J. Phillips in the Spring 2004 VQR, a box of 7.62 mm ammo was going for more than US$2 in the Baghdad bazaars the previous December (but that may have been exaggerating the price on the high side).

al
An East Indian tree that grows in the Scrabble forest, where it bears two-letter fruit.

AL
Action Learning.

The cover story of the June 2004 issue of T+D was about AL, with illustrations of a Superman character with ``AL'' in place of ``S.'' Since AL is my middle name (as in Alfred ``Al'' Cronym), naturally I was interested. Like any good business story, this article gets right to the point: it explains immediately why you the reader are interested in action learning, models exciting words about what it can do for your bottom line, produces anonymous testimonials of praise, and gives other essential information. Along about the third page, not really as an afterthought but more to dot all the tees and cross all the q's, there's a section entitled ``What is action learning?'' I quote the beginning:

Since Reg Revans first introduced action learning in the coal mines of Wales & England in the 1940s, there have been multiple variations of the concept, but all forms of action learning share the elements of real people resolving and taking real action on real problems in real time and learning while doing so.

Now let's get real here, people. Do we really need so many supporting columns? We could get a real high yield out of this seam if we knocked some of them down. Alright then, let's take some action! Right now, in real time! Good, I think we've really lear-- Oh-no-look-OUT! Gee, it's a real shame those were real miners.

[column]

Ä&L
Ägypten und Levante : Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Archäologie und deren Nachbargebiete. Herausgegeben vom Österreichischen Archäologischen Institut / Abteilung Kairo und der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften; Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, 1990-.

German, `Egypt and the Levant : Journal for the Archaeology of Egypt and Neighboring Regions.' Edited by the Austrian Archaeological Institute, Cairo Section, and by the Austrian Academy of Sciences; a publication of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna.

Articles in German or English (roughly in equal numbers).

.al
(Domain name code for) Albania. Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has a page of national links. They don't seem to have any links up from the country itself right now. If Albania hadn't been in the news lately, this alone would be a useful clue.

Rec.Travel offers some links. I offer the following advice: visit someplace else for now.

AL
Postal code abbreviation for ALabama (not ALaska, which is AK). The traditional abbreviation is Ala.; the colloquial short form is 'Bama.

The Grateful Dead song ``Alabama Getaway'' begins

Thirty-two teeth in a jawbone; Alabama trying for none.
Before I have to hit him, I hope he's got the sense to run.

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Alabama. USACityLink.com has a page for Alabama.

A Canadian carpetbagger named Neil Young dissed the state in his songs ``Southern Man'' and ``Alabama.'' Lynyrd Skynyrd gallantly rose to her defense in a palinode called ``Sweet Home Alabama'' (their first big hit). Alabama is not host to a Harvard of the South, but that entry is relevant nevertheless.

In the song titled ``Alabama,'' Young sang ``You've got the rest of the union -- to help you along!'' According to Robert Hunter and the late Jerry Garcia, ``Forty-nine sister states all had Alabama in their eyes.''

Al
(Montreal) ALouette. A member of the CFL team. ``Als'' is used for the team name.

DB Alphonso Roundtree, receiver Alphonso Browning, and Alan Wetmore are all former-Al Als (and former Als Als). Any time after Wetmore receives the Gatorade treatment, journalists can deploy the ``former-Al Al Wetmore All Wet No More'' headline. Use two-inch type.

Al
Chemical symbol for aluminum. Atomic number 13. A lightweight metal and a p-dopant in silicon semiconductor. Kind of an oddball non-transition metal, sitting at a literal corner of the periodic table. In Britain, aluminum is called aluminium (see entry for some of the sordid details). Learn less (less is more) at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

Aluminum is the only chemical whose symbol is also the correct spelling of a common English name. In fact, the only one whose symbol is the correct spelling of my name.

The Aluminum Association is online.

According to the IMDb bio of the late Tony Randall, the actor ``[s]tudied voice for 32 years but did not act on it, quipping `I have a nice healthy tone, but it's not terribly musical. If beautiful voices are golden, mine is aluminum.' ''

In 1991, Fleur Adcock published a volume with the title TIME-ZONES, subtitled Causes. It had a poem called ``Aluminum,'' and since it's only 24 lines long I can hardly excerpt a small, ``fair-use'' portion of it. Oh well, here goes: it ends ``warning you of dementia to come.'' It's about aluminum-containing water-sterilization tablets and the unenlightened Water Board and how aluminum is going to get you one way or another. Unlike some better poems, it doesn't contain a detailed quantitative analysis, though it is informed by real research. Research had suggested that aluminum was a or the main cause of Alzheimer's disease. The most readily understood reason is that both terms begin with the letter A followed by the letter L, though this angle was not pursued by medical researchers. The most direct evidence for a connection was the reported discovery of aluminosilicates in neuritic plaque cores. (Core-containing neuritic plaques are extracellular bits of crud found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The plaques range up to 200 microns in diameter and typically consist of an amyloid core, whatever that is, surrounded by abnormal neurites, whatever they are. So now you know.) Anyway, since at least 1976, various researchers had reported aluminum and silicon in the cores. But poetry is a fast-moving field, and you have to keep up with the literature. The original research was based on techniques that we wouldn't call very sensitive today -- able to detect aluminum at 100 to 1000 ppm. At least as early as 1986, however, much more sensitive techniques (1 ppm) failed to detect any aluminum.

It is not known why, in composing his poem, Adcock ignored the contrary findings that had already been published, particularly the laser microprobe mass analysis of A.J. Stern, D.P. Perl, D. Munoz-Garcia, P.F. Good, C. Abraham, and D.J. Selkoe, Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology, vol. 45, #3, p. 361 (May 1986). If he could have had the luxury of doing so, I'm sure the poet would have waited for more definitive findings, but you know how it is in poetry: ``publish and perish.'' In fact, just one year after Fleur Adcock's poem was published, the problem was convincingly resolved by J.P. Landsberg, B. McDonald, and F. Watt, of Oxford University [``Absence of aluminum in neuritic plaque cores in Alzheimer's disease,'' in Nature vol. 360, #6399, pp. 65-68 (Nov. 5, 1992)]. Using multiple simultaneous nuclear-microscopic analytic probes (PIXE, RBS, and STIM), they studied stained and unstained samples (about 100 of each) of temporal-cortex and hippocampus tissue taken from seven AD cases and two controls.

The stained samples contained a little bit of aluminum (in 30% of all background scans, and in 8% of the plaque cores -- the latter in the AD samples only, of course). The unstained samples had no aluminum in any plaque cores. Hmmm. They studied the staining reagents, which are needed in the kinds of studies that had originally found aluminum in the plaque cores, and discovered that the reagents contained aluminum and silicon, apparently from airborne-dust contamination. (There was also some aluminum in the pioloform film supporting the tissue samples, and this apparently led to the detection of aluminum in 5-10% of the background scans.)

To be fair, the balance of research indicates that aluminum probably does play some role in AD, but so, to a similar extent, do iron, zinc, and copper. All create an oxidative environment and all are dysregulated or found in elevated quantities in some AD brain tissue. So don't bother to throw away your aluminum pots and pans, unless you're planning the same for the rest of your pots and pans. In conclusion, if this little object lesson convinces even one poet not to write an under-researched didactic poem, the entry will have been worthwhile. Of course, if you are not a poet, then the entry has been a complete waste of your time.

AL
American League. One of the two component leagues of North American Major League Baseball (MLB). The one that uses the designated hitter.

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A.L.
Anno Lucis. Latin, `[in the] year of light.' That is, in the year ... since the Lord commanded there to be light. Reputed to be a preferred Masonic usage for the more common A.M. (q.v.).

AL
Anthropological Linguistics. A journal.

A & L
Arts and Letters. Humanities. Visit Arts and Letters Daily.

According to the Princeton Campus Plan distributed in January 2008, over the subsequent decade the Princeton University campus will come to be organized into ``neighborhoods.'' Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners LLP and the university asministration have tried to make these neighborhoods somehow coherent or logical. Thus, there are a ``Core Campus,'' a ``Natural Sciences Neighborhood,'' an ``Ivy Lane and Western Way Neighborhood'' with various athletic fields, etc. (Looking over the map, I'm surprised to realize that along with the emotional scars and the bald pate, the place also left me with some fondish memories.)

There is also to be something called the ``Arts and Transit Neighborhood'' in the area currently dominated by McCarter Theatre and the NJ Transit Dinky terminus. (The Dinky is a small train that runs on a spur connecting the university with Princeton Junction -- on the line connecting New York and Trenton.) This paragraph is just a preview. I'll put in an entry for ``A & T'' as soon as I see that in use. Maybe sooner.

Al
Nickname for Alan and related names, Alex and Alexander, Albert and Alfred.

Ala.
Alabama website? Brought to us by Einet, er, TradeWave. See AL entry above.

ALA, Ala, ala
ALAnine. An amino acid. The dominant ingredient in spider silk. For an image (of the amino acid) and more go here.

ALA
Alpha Linolenic Acid.

ALA
American Laminators Association.

ALA
American Laryngological Association. Founded in 1878. (Not long after the invention of the larynx, if I'm not mistaken.)

ALA
American Library Association. Preeminent organization for librarians and libraries in the US. Their toll-free number is 800-545-2433.

A saying among reference librarians is that ``patrons know what they want, but they don't know what they need.'' If adopted too rigidly, this could lead to interesting situations.

Met Jan. 9-15, 1998 in New Orleans, La., and June 25 - July 2 in Washington, DC.

The ALA publishes an ALA Bulletin and an ALA Washington News. Cf. CLA.

ALA
American Lung Association.

ALA
Association for Laboratory Automation.

ALAA
Australian Literary Agents' Association. Founded in 2002, and they really ought to get a web-presence. (I can't find one at the beginning of 2005.) See the AAR entry for more. Modeled on the AAR and AAA. Like the latter, it only accepts as members agents that have been in the business at least three years.

ALABC
Advanced Lead Acid Battery Consortium.

ALAD
Academic Librarians Assisting the Disabled. A subgroup of the ALA's OLOS.

ALAD
Asociación Latinoamericana de Diabetes. Founded in 1970 in Buenos Aires.

Aladdin
Aladdin Systems makes Stuffit and other Macintosh compression software.

ALADI
Asociación Latinoamericana de Integración.

Alamo
Spanish, `cottonwood [tree].'

ALANA
African-American, Latino, Asian and Native American.

Alana Miles
Misspelling of Alannah Myles.

But you know, if you cock your head right, Alana looks like Latin (I mean very, very early Italian, not, like, South American). Then the genitive singular form would be Alanis. There's another well-known female Canadian rock singer with the initials A.M. and the first name Alanis: Alanis Morissette. When she was getting started, Morissette used the single name Alanis to avoid people confusing her with Myles. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Other female rocker singers with initials A.M. are listed at this site. Gee, I hope they keep this important information resource up-to-date and complete.

I wouldn't have bothered to spin out this tenuous connection except that The Brunching Shuttlecocks, a very valuable information resource, serves a Alanis Morissette morose lyric generator.

Alan Keyes
A former ambassador and an unsuccessful candidate for the 1996 and 2000 Republican Presidential nominations. Not to be confused with homonym Allen keys. Joined the US State department in 1978, a protege of UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick in the Reagan administration. Resigned from State in 1987 after disagreement on UN funding. (In the GOP, to resign in protest is not considered noble; it's considered a sign of not being a team player. To resign a short but decent interval after a disagreement is the party's equivalent.)

In 1988 and 1992 he suffered lopsided losses against popular Democrat incumbents in runs for US Senate (to represent Maryland). I'm not going to claim that Keyes is more in sync with Maryland's electorate than Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), but a certain senator can apparently lower the average IQ of any room she wanders into. One would think that the absence of any necessary correlation between intelligence and political success is obvious to all, but apparently it is not so obvious to the successful politicians. During his one term as president, George Bush was in the habit of asking rhetorically ``if you're so smart, how come I'm president?'' as if some contradiction were implicit.

In a February 2000 Nightline, Ted Koppel interviewed campaign directors of some retired politicians. They included Michael Deaver, who directed Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign. Reagan was being dogged by the press for his claim that trees were a major source of air pollution, and his campaign was trying to get some other issue (any other issue) into public consciousness. They repeatedly coached and importuned their candidate to give his foreign policy speech and then walk past the rope line holding back the press without answering any questions. Sure enough, after the speech Reagan walked up to the press horde and answered the inevitable polluting-tree question, obliterating the TV-newsworthiness of his speech. Afterwards, Deaver was despondent and reminded Reagan of all they had gone over about avoiding the press trap, and Reagan asked ``if you're so smart, how come you're not running for president?'' Deaver found this disarming. (In his hagiography of Reagan, Deaver returns to the sulfur-dioxide-emitting-tree episode and tries to spin it as positively as he can, claiming Reagan always knew better but just got maneuvered into misstatement in a debate.)

There was from time to time a movement within his campaigns to ``let Reagan be Reagan.'' After Reagan looked frighteningly senile in his first debate with Mondale (campaign of 1984), Nancy became assertive in this insistence and was given enormous credit for turning the campaign around. (The key incident was showing the patience to allow Reagan to remember an old movie gag about youth and experience that he used in the second debate with Mondale.)

I still have stuff to say about the putative subject of this entry. After the 1992 loss to Mikulski, Keyes started up a conservative talk show, ``America's Wake-Up Call: The Alan Keyes Show,'' syndicated nationally. In news shorthand he is usually described as a former US ambassador, but that is incorrect. Ambassadorships are plums the president grants to campaign supporters. Keyes was in the civil service and held lower-visibility responsible positions -- consular official in Bombay (1979-1980), desk officer Zimbabwe (1980-1), US representative to the miserable UNESCO and various stateside positions.

Alannah Myles
The female Rod Stewart. Had a hit with ``Black Velvet.''

Al-Anon
A support group for the families of alcoholics.

Alan Smithee
A standard pseudonym used by movie directors unwilling to admit responsibility.

Okay, technically, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) allows a director to use a pseudonym only if the producers made changes contrary to the director's artistic intent. In practice, though, this might not be that difficult to arrange. The real problem is that directing a movie is not exactly a reclusive activity, so the pseudonym offers little protection at best, and raises suspicion of motives at worst.

In 1997, a rather poor movie called An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn took as premise that a director whose name is already Alan Smithee has no escape. Quite ironically, Arthur Hiller, who directed AASF:BHB, disagreed with writer/producer Joe Eszterhas and received DGA approval to remove his name from the credits, so in principle this was an Alan Smithee Film: "An Alan Smithee Film: `Burn Hollywood Burn'." (To get an idea of how this film was assembled, see how the soundtrack was put together.)

To summarize the situation:
The film-within-a-film was "Burn Hollywood Burn," directed by the fictional character "Alan Smithee" (played by actor Eric Idle). The film about the film-within-a-film was "An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn" and was in fact directed by Arthur Hiller, whose producer-sabotaged work was allowed to be credited to "Alan Smithee," a pseudonym.

Leonard Maltin rated this movie a BOMB. ``BOMB'' is not some cutesy acronym here. It's the word bomb, written in capital letters for emphasis. It's Maltin's lowest rating. His seven ratings range from four stars down to one-and-a-half stars, in steps of half a star, followed by BOMB.

For writers (movie writers, ça va sans dire) the rules work differently (see WGA).

Another sort of anonymity in movies occurs in a story I vaguely remember about the writer Graham Greene. Some actress friends apparently wangled him a bit part on a movie they were acting in, without revealing his true identity to the director, who they knew had never met Greene in person. From IMDb I guess this must be Truffaut's Day for Night (La Nuit américaine, 1973), where he plays an English insurance broker. Greene's full name was Henry Graham Greene, and he is credited here as Henry Graham.

Nick Lowe mentioned on the Classics list a somewhat similar incident involving Richard Stanley, the writer and original director of the dismal John Frankenheimer remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau. After predictable tussles with star Val Kilmer [who has a track record of making enemies], Stanley was sacked on the third day of shooting, whereupon he promptly sneaked back on to the set in a spare ape-monster suit and remained there, with the full knowledge of many of the cast (but not Frankenheimer), for the rest of the shoot.

ALAPA
American Lung Association of PennsylvaniA.

ALARA
Australian Ladies' Amateur Radio Association (Inc.).

ALARA
As Low As Reasonably Achievable. Sounds like a formula many could agree with, so long as everyone could define ``reasonably'' as he wished.

Also ALARP.

Alara Kalama
The first great teacher of the Buddha.

ALARP
As Low As Reasonably { Practical | Practicable }. British variant of ALARA. ALARP is more common than ALARA in Britain, and would therefore be the presumptive preference in Europe and the Commonwealth, but India ought to be an exception, because practical there is generally taken in an economic sense only.

AlAs
Aluminum Arsenide. An indirect-gap III-V semiconductor (2.16 eV), whose lattice constant of 5.661 Å is very close to that of the direct-gap GaAs.

ALASKA, A.L.A.S.K.A.
Alaska Lines And Stories Kept Alive. A small press. They published at least one book in 1997, and they were listed in the 2000-2001 R.R. Bowker Publishers, Distributors, & Wholesalers of the United States. Maybe they should have focused on keeping the publishing house alive.

ALAT
ALanine AminoTransferase.

ALAT
Assistant Laboratory Animal Technician.

ALATA
Alabama Athletic Trainers' Association. Evidently a trade organization for jock-strap manufacturers. Oh wait-- that's ``athletic supporters!'' Eh, whatevah.

ALB
Abraham Lincoln {Brigade|Battalion}. ``Abraham Lincoln Brigade'' refers to organized US volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. It's useful that ``brigade'' here represents an error, because it allows one to use that term in a loose, inclusive sense, and to reserve ``Abraham Lincoln Battalion'' for the military unit organized as part of the International Brigades at the end of 1936. They were decimated within a month of being put into action in February, and later supplemented by the newly trained George Washington Battalion (both were part of the XV International Brigade). Later in 1937 the two were merged into the Lincoln-Washington Battalion, which also was eventually decimated. Only 120 of the original 500 Americans survived the first sixteen months.

There are or were, broadly, two views of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers: one is that they were anti-fascist fighters for democracy, the other that they were supporters of the Communist side. During the Spanish Civil War they could be both, but after the Hitler-Stalin pact the veterans could be at most one. The American government's view was always that one couldn't be sure.

A physics professor I know at the University of Buffalo remembers once being surprised by a question about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on a security-clearance form -- in the are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been-a-member-of section. He hadn't known that the Lincoln Brigade was a Popular-Front-ish organization. The Encyclopedia USA entry explains: ``Although it was established and recruited by Communists, used for propaganda purposes, and largely supplied with Russian arms, by no means were all its members Communists.'' (It might have been more straightforward to note that in addition to committed Communists, the ALB attracted various other Republic supporters, including Wobblies, anarchists, and socialists. No doubt there were a few mere adventurers as well.)

The bit about ``Russian arms'' is unfair: because of official (Anglo-French, League of Nations) and unofficial (US) embargoes, the main source of arms available to the Republican side was Russia, and the arms were not donated. Germany and Italy contributed substantially, and substantially more than the Republicans were able to buy, to the Nationalist side. Italy and Russia, incidentally, adhered officially to the arms embargo.

I haven't seen much speculation regarding why the Abraham Lincoln Battalion came to be better known as a ``brigade,'' so I'll hazard a guess. In Spanish, most adjectives follow the nouns they modify, as do names functioning attributively. Hence, the wording on the battalion flag at right: [Image of flag: 3 lines of white text on a dark blue field.]

1er. Batallón Americano
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
BRIGADA INTERNACIONAL

While the Americans who fought there doubtless understood the order of battle sufficiently, they were few and many of them died. (Ultimately, it is estimated that 2,800 Americans served in the International Brigades and 900 were killed.) Back home, many Americans' knowledge of the forces involved may have been informed by this flag and similar untranslated materials, and many must have inferred therefrom that ``Abraham Lincoln Brigada'' was the unit name. The capitalization also tends to guide the eye.

ALB
Asian Longhorned Beetle. It's about three centimeters long, black with white dots on the body, and has curved antennae that are longer than its body. It's spreading in North America, which it is assumed to have reached by way of a cargo ship from China. The insects are getting in on globalization too. It feeds on at least 11 North American tree species, but if you like maple syrup, this bug is a personal enemy of yours.

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albedo
Whiteness: the fraction of incident electromagnetic (``light'') radiation reflected by a surface or body. From the Latin albus, `white.' Exactly complementary to absorptivity, which is the measure of the blackness of a body: a ``black body'' absorbs all incident light (albedo = 0; absorptivity = 1). A ``white body'' has an albedo of unity or 100% (absorptivity = 0). A white body that reflects specularly is a mirror. A ``grey body'' body has albedo intermediate between 0 and 1. The term ``colored body'' is used to emphasize that there is a frequency dependence in the albedo, but the term ``grey body'' is sometimes nevertheless used for colored bodies simply to indicate that the important fact is that the albedo is intermediate.

The term albedo is most often encountered in connection with celestial objects and artificial satellites. The terms absorptivity or reflectivity (same as albedo) are more often used to describe surfaces.

Objects in a vacuum do not experience convective or conductive heating, more-or-less by definition, so their energy balance is determined completely by radiation and material transfer (ejection, vaporization, accretion, etc.). In the case of planets, material transfer is negligible, and we can determine the average surface temperature of a planet from radiation balances. By a simple thermodynamic argument, Kirchoff demonstrated that light reflectivity equals absorptivity. This seems to imply that a change in albedo, and hence the rate of light absorption, is accompanied by a proportionate change in thermal emission. As a result, albedo does not seem to affect the equilibrium temperature. However, it has to be understood that absorptivity/emissivity is a function of light frequency. The effective light absorptivity is an average of the frequency-dependent light absorptivity, weighted by the frequency distribution of the incident light. The effective emissivity is a different average of the same frequency-dependent absorptivity (the same as the frequency-dependent emissivity). The weighting that determines the effective emissivity is the black-body spectrum corresponding to the temperature of the emitting surface.

For any planet in our solar system, the dominant source of incident light is the sun, whose frequency spectrum is, to a good approximation, a black-body spectrum of temperature 5730 K. The sun heats the planets, so all planets are colder than 5730 K.

[You can accept that heat flow is from hot to cold, or you can prove it by combining the second law of thermodynamics with the definition of temperature -- 1/T is the partial derivative of entropy with respect to energy.]

[When I have some time, I'll explain the greenhouse effect here.]

Strictly speaking, the 5730 K bound mentioned earlier applies to a certain average of the surface temperature. Nothing prevents a planet from having hot spots that are hotter. Many chemical reactions can easily reach these temperatures --- it's a matter of properly confining the heat generated in an exothermic reaction. The larger hot spots that can be observed by interplanetary probes, on the other hand, are plasmas arising from atmospheric or planetary electrical and magnetic phenomena. A spectacular one was found by the Voyager missions in 1979: a sulfur-rich plasma near Jupiter's moon Io with a temperature around 100,000 K. It was not present when Pioneer 10 flew by in 1973. Smaller local plasmas associated with lightning can be even more impressively hot on shorter time and length scales. Data from the late Galileo satellite orbiting Jupiter, including images of eruption in progress, indicated that Io is the most volcanically active place in the solar system. (The surface layer (photosphere) of the sun is in more violent convulsions than the surface of any of its satellites. However, though the definitions of terms like volcanism and volcanic have been extended to cover the convulsive phenomena on Io, they are not widely used for solar activity.)

If they are small and isolated enough, hot spots don't have to be temporary either. The two most interesting planets in this respect are Earth and Jupiter. Jupiter, the largest gas giant, consists primarily of hydrogen and helium (in a ratio of about 8:1), with traces of other elements and deuterium. The pressure at its core is high enough to drive significant fusion; the core temperature is perhaps 30,000 K, and Jupiter emits about twice as much energy as it receives from the sun. Here's a good link for further information.

Earth was formed by the gravitational instability of cold dust and larger particles -- collisions tended to convert mutual gravitational energy into vibrational (i.e., thermal) energy, until one large warm condensed object resulted. Further heating was caused by compression (isentropic compression is not isothermal) and radioactive decay. In the hot molten object that resulted, the denser compounds and elements, including uranium, sank and concentrated toward the center. Even as the earth cooled by thermal radiation, the highly radioactive core has continued to generate heat, so the earth radiates slightly more heat than it absorbs from the sun and the average temperature increases with increasing depth. The temperature of the inner core is around 7000 K. This page has further interesting information. (Since Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, its age about equals one half-life of 238U.

The core heating of the earth gives rise to volcanism and plate tectonic activity. Venus, the planet most closely resembling Earth in mass (Venus's mass is 0.81 Earth's mass) and composition (surface rocks resemble basalt), also appears to have significant radioactive heat generation, as demonstrated by the presence of shield volcanoes. The relative absence of craters on their surfaces indicates that Venus is still geologically active, but there is no evidence of plate tectonic motion.

The other planets, which have no significant internal heat sources, have core temperatures about equal to their average surface temperatures. They'd be exactly equal, but the instantaneous average of the surface temperature varies over time, due to effects such as orbit eccentricity, solar variability, radiation from and eclipse by other objects, and rotation of the planet's nonuniform surface. The core temperature tracks the surface variation slowly, so at any given moment it is not precisely equal to the surface temperature. A long-term average of the temperatures of the planetary core and surface should be very close.

Heat can also be generated by friction dissipating tidal forces. This seems to be the case with Io, the moon closest to Jupiter. However, like Earth's moon, Jupiter's nearest moon Io is tidally locked: its rotation period equals its revolution period, so the same hemisphere faces its planet at all times. As a result, the direct tidal interaction with Jupiter no longer heats Io. However, other moons exert tidal forces as Io goes past them, and this is believed to be the source of heat that explains the spectacular volcanoes observed there recently.

Albion
This is a semantically marked word for England or Great Britain, a name one might regard as archaic, romantic, or poetic. The origin of the name is uncertain, although the alb- root (indicating `white' in Latin) has been interpreted to mean that the word refers to the white cliffs of Dover. Of course, this sort of reasoning can easily be off the mark. Pizza Alba, for example, is a white pizza (it's made without tomato). It is widely supposed that the name is thus descriptive, but in fact, the name is something of a coincidence. What happened was that a princess of northern Italy had heard about the southern Italian peasant pie called pizza, and was interested in trying it. In her day, tomato was not eaten in Northern Italy, and probably not easily available there either. (Further information at the ID entry.) The cook did not risk offending her palate, and concocted the now famous pizza for la Principessa Alba. In this case, of course, Alba does in fact mean `white,' at least in origin. More deceptive, if you're thinking Romance etymology rather than Germanic, is a name like Alberto, from Germanic roots meaning `all' and `bright.'

There's an Albion College in Albion, Michigan. According to the President's message,

``Life is a series of connections. Most of them are random and disjointed. At Albion, the connections are intentional and coherent: for that is the essence of Albion College.

Wow. I think we'll aspire to that and achieve it in this glossary.

albite
NaAlSi3O8

ALBO
Automatic (telecommunications) Line Build-Out.

ALC
Automatic Level Control. A feedback loop that maintains output power in a specified range, or near a specified value, under variable conditions (such as weakening battery voltage, say). Used in portable phones and modems, for instance.

ALCA
Association de Lutte Contre l'Ambrosia. A Quebec `Association for the Fight Against Ragweed.'

ALCASE
Alliance for Lung Cancer Advocacy, Support, and Education. Advocating, supporting, and educating lung cancer, or something like that.

ALCM
Air-Launched Cruise Missile. Cf. SLCM.

ALCOA
This is the official name of a company that once was called Aluminum (Al) Corporation of America. That company was the first customer of the AC power supplied by Westinghouse from Niagara Falls in the early 1900's. Buffalo quickly came to have the largest chemical production of any city in the world.

alcohol
Remember, you can't spell alcohol without coho. I think that with a little work and some seawater lemmas, that could be used to prove the the salmon part of the white wine conjecture.

ALCR
Adjacent-Channel Leakage (power) Ratio.

ALCS, A.L.C.S.
American League (AL) Championship Series. Used to be best-of-five, now seven. Just like the NLCS, but with a designated hitter (no more at the LCS entry).

ALCS
American Library Color Slide Co., Inc. ``[T]he world's largest commercial source of art-related color slides.'' ``[A] source of color slides for the study of Art, Architecture, Photography, World Cultures, Minority Studies [Democrats in Congress?], Religion, Languages [speaking in tongues known and unknown], the Social Sciences and Humanities.''

ALCS
Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society. According to their META DESCRIPTION: ``the British collecting society for all writers. The principal purpose of ALCS is to ensure that hard-to-collect revenues due to authors are efficiently collected and distributed.''

It must be said that historically (and maybe one of ALCS's pages says it), one of the principal difficulties that published authors have encountered in collecting royalties has been the traditionally obscure sales and royalties statement from the publisher. It's one of the reasons for having an agent (see AAA).

ALCS has a ``Where Are They Now?'' list of a few dozen unregistered authors for whom (or for whose estates) they are holding royalties that they can't deliver, either because they can't locate or haven't had a response from them.

ALCTS
Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. A division of the ALA. That's collections of books, as explained in the ICLC entry, not collections of fines or contributions or other moneys, as in the preceding entry.

ALD
Academy of Laser Dentistry.

ALD
AdrenoLeukoDystrophy. The diagnosis of Lorenzo Odone, whose story was dramatized in the 1992 movie Lorenzo's Oil.

ALD
Atomic Layer Deposition. Also the International Conference on Atomic Layer Deposition. ALD 2013 took place on July 28-31 in San Diego, California.

ALDA
ALabama Dental Association. Famously, Alan Alda played a ``Hawkeye'' on TV's M*A*S*H. A surprising number of reader of this glossary have written to ask ``so what?'' Well, Alabama is not the Hawkeye State. It's the Yellowhammer State. (The Yellowhammer is the Alabama state bird.) I might mention that birds don't have teeth, even though they're descended from animals that do, but I better not or you'll think that that's why I mentioned the M*A*S*H connection, such as it is.

ALDA
Association of Late-Deafened Adults. The hyphen is pretty important: there is little we can do to help the late, lamented deafened adults. The distinction between those born deaf and those who lose their hearing after birth is also important. Even those who lose their hearing in the first year have a tremendous advantage over the born-deaf in learning ordinary language. ALDA is not concerned with this distinction, but serves adults who grew up hearing (LDA's), and who may never even have met another deaf person.

ALDC
Adaptive Lossless Data Compression.

aldehyde
ALcohol DEHYDrogenatE[d]. From the synthesis -- a primary alcohol (an alcohol with the OH on a primary, i.e. an end, carbon) that loses hydrogens becomes an aldehyde:
          H                 H
          |                  \
	R-C-H        -->      C=O    +    H
          |                  /             2
          O-H               R
        alcohol            aldehyde      molecular
                                          hydrogen
When the group R is hydrogen (H), RCHO (i.e. CH2O or HCHO) is formaldehyde (traditional name) or methanal. For R a methyl group, RCHO (i.e. CH3CH2O) is ethanal, etc.

If the dehydrogenation takes place on a secondary carbon, the product is called a ketone.

ALDF
Animal Legal Defense Fund.

ALDS, A.L.D.S.
American League (AL) Division Series. Just like the NLDS (q.v.), but with a designated hitter.

ale
In current usage: beer, but with only three letters. In principle, and historically, the term designates a malt beverage with more of everything except water. More hops, so more bitter, more grain, so darker and heavier, and with more time: more alcohol. It is a federal crime to remove the punctuation from the preceding sentence. If you do you'll be put away in the same dungeon with the cretins who tear materials labels off of pillows. Cf. beer, alewife.

ALE
Application Logic Element.

ALE
Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts.

ALE
Atomic Layer Epitaxy. MBE or MOCVD performed by alternating successive exposures to anionic and cationic vapors, so that growth is slow and layer thickness is very tightly controlled.

ALEC
American Legislative Exchange Council. Politically conservative.

Alembic
A maker of fine string instruments, particularly basses and guitars made with slightly exotic types of wood.

Home of the original Hippie Sandwich ™

Also the name of a series of books on the history of chemistry, for some reason. And something else too.

Alembic, The
The Alembic is one of those small literary magazines that publishes works so good that they can't be sold and won't be published anywhere else. As the submission instructions say, ``[m]anuscripts known to be under consideration elsewhere will be returned to the authors unread.'' This seems to me to entail epistemological or operationalization difficulties. Another problem is the information that ``no manuscripts or artwork can be returned, nor any query answered, unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope.'' I'm tempted to mail a manuscript (without SASE) with a note saying it's under consideration elsewhere, just to see what happens. In my dreams, they thrash in an endless loop of bad logic until smoke rises from the English Department of Providence College. (Providence College is in Providence, Rhode Island. In Rhode Island, practically everything is.)

The cover bears the title

The Alembic       
<Season> <yyyy>       

You could be forgiven for assuming that it's a quarterly publication, but the value of <Season> is always "Spring" -- it's an annual publication.

The contents are, in order, Poetry, Fiction, Art, and Translations. The poetry is sincere, and I'm sure its authors were moved by their inspirations.

ALEP
Angle Lap Edge Profilometry. A way to determine the depth and thickness of a buried amorphous layer (of Si): an edge within the area that contains the buried layer is beveled, and the beveled edge is etched with a chemical etchant that etches amorphous material faster. The amorphous region then appears as a depression. With a shallow bevel, the depressed region is easier to locate and measure than a depressed region etched into a butt edge.

A-levels
Advanced-level exams. College entrance exams used in England and Wales, taken at the end of the (two-year) sixth form. If British A-levels are like American SAT's, then American PSAT's correspond roughly to British AS-levels. (But they have their own ``SAT's.'') Further information at the GCSE and QCA entries. A-level ``exams'' include summer grading of some coursework completed during the school year.

In 2002, in another of a sequence of frequent changes, the A-levels were computed for the first time using a combination of the AS-levels and a set of exams called the A2's. Using the longer baseline ought to have made results more predictable, but it apparently didn't. In an effort to maintain year-on-year consistency in pass rates, the grading was apparently very ham-handedly rigged. More on that at the QCA entry.

alewife
A North American fish, Alosa pseudoherengus, that resembles a small shad. In fact, because any fish of the Alosa genus is a shad, it resembles what it is. So there: proof that sometimes, at least, a thing is like itself. And you can be beside yourself with rage. Well, like gathers unto like. Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.

As you can guess from the Latin species name, the alewife also resembles herring. It's a small silvery fish, and it used to be an ocean fish, but in 1873 it was detected in the Great Lakes. It's adapted to fresh water, but it's not completely adapted to warm temperatures. When it gets warm too fast in Spring, the previous autumn's generation of alewives succumbs in large numbers. Thus, in some years, around May, the shore will be covered with a band of three- to five-inch fish from the die-off.

Alexander Mac
An obscure but rigorous law of sociology requires that until 1891, the Canadian Prime Minister have a name that contains Alexander Mac as a substring. If this exact principle of electoral dynamics had been discovered by 1867, it would have been far more impressive, as predictive laws tend to be. (A number of simpler approximate principles are known for the US, such as that the taller and shorter-named of the major-party candidates will be elected president.)

ALEXIS
Array of Low Energy X-ray (space) Imaging Sensors.

ALF
Absorption-Line Filter.

ALF
American Liver Foundation. ``[T]he only national, voluntary non-profit health agency dedicated to preventing, treating and curing hepatitis and all liver diseases through research, education and support groups.''

Related entries: AASLD, ADHF.

ALF
Australian Lung Foundation.

al frasco
Spanish: `[in]to the jar.'

al fresco
Italian: `in the open air.'

ALGA
Australian Local Government Association.

AlGaAs
Alloy semiconductor AlGaAs (i.e., Al1-xGaxAs).

Al-gas
A gas named in honor of Al, the homeboy of the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve. Hmmm. I hope that's in honor. Also refers to ``AlGaAs.'' Cf. Al Gore.

Algèria
Catalunian name for Algeria. Also widely though incorrectly used in Spanish (i.e., Castilian) where the country name is Argelia.

algeriana
Spanish name for a kind of heavy multicolored fabric used for curtains. It was originally manufactured in France, whence the name, meaning `Algerian.' Cf. Argelia.

algo
Spanish, `something, anything.' Vide hidalgo.

ALGOL, Algol
Contraction of ``ALGOrithmic Language.'' First created in 1958 (``IAL''), by Peter Naur and others. ALGOL created fervent passions, but mostly in Europe, apparently. In a book review in 1963 (see The Computer Journal, vol. 6, #2, pp. 143, 168), J.K. Iliffe described ALGOL as a ``spectre ... which has haunted Europe since 1958.'' Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes source code for three Algol programs and identifies Ada and Simula as similar languages.

The definitive description of the language was published as ``Revised report on the algorithmic language ALGOL 60,'' in Computer Journal, vol. 5, pp. 349-367 (1963). The report was edited by Peter Naur, dedicated to the memory of William Turanski, and written by thirteen coauthors. It's available online. Barron et al., in the article cited at the CPL entry, wrote that ``[t]he publication of this report [only months earlier] marked a turning point in the development in programming languages, since it concentrated attention on, and to a large extent solved, the problems of unambiguously defining a computational process or algorithm.''

ALGOL itself never seems to have been very popular in the US, but descendants of the language, particularly C and its object-oriented extensions, are dominant today. Here, in brief, is the line of descent from ALGOL 60 to C:

ALGOL --> CPL --> BCPL --> B --> C

ALGOL development did not cease with the creation of CPL, of course. ``ALGOL 66,'' said C.A.R. Hoare, ``was a great advance over its successors.'' (If you can give me details on or a source for this quote, please email me.) ALGOL 68 was considered disastrously complex, and it was the last major programming language to bear the ALGOL name. In reaction or revulsion, Niklaus Wirth created Pascal, which enjoyed a certain vogue but did not leave any major direct descendant.

(Regarding the sought quote: no, it's not in Hoare's article ``An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming'' that appeared in vol. 12, iss. 10 of CACM (October 1969; pp. 576-580, 583), but thanks for the thought. That paper is famous, though, and was republished in CACM's 25th anniversary edition (vol. 26, iss. 1; January 1983; pp. 53-6); in it, Hoare introduced a famous notation:

To state the required connection between a precondition (P), a program (Q) and a description of the result of its execution (R), we introduce a new notation:
P{Q}R.
This may be interpreted ``If the assertion P is true before initiation of a program Q, then the assertion R will be true on its completion.'' If there are no preconditions imposed, we write true {Q}R.

ALGOL 30
Not the ALGOL version that came with the LGP-30, but a simplified version, created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtzof, for use by undergraduates at Dartmouth College. It wasn't their only effort along these lines. For others, see this DART entry.

Al Gore
Inventor of the ALGORithm, I believE.

algos
Ancient Greek `pain.' The root alg- occurs in English analgesic, myalgia, neuralgia, and the names of any number of unpleasant medical conditions.

algum
A precious wood mentioned in the Bible (according to OSPD4). Apparently there are still a few bits of scattered in the Scrabble forest. The plural form is algums; the metathetic forms almug and almugs are also accepted.

ALH84001
A meteor found in the ALlen Hills region of Antarctica. (Presumably the first such found in 1984.) Gases trapped in its interior match those found on the surface of Mars by Voyager missions in the 1970's. Studies of this meteor in 1996 fed exuberant speculation that life once existed on Mars.

ALI
Academic Libraries of Indiana.

ALI
American Law Institute. ``[E]stablished in 1923 `to promote the clarification and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social needs, to secure the better administration of justice, and to encourage and carry on scholarly and scientific legal work'.''

Sure, and lose all the extra business from having obscure, perversely formulated and generally incomprehensible laws.

Membership is attorneys, legal scholars, and judges.

The ALI shares copyright for the UCC with the NCC. The ALI publishes Restatements of the Law, secondary legal sources that summarize common law as followed in various states of the US.

ALI
ATM Line Interface.

ALIC
Archives Library Information Center. ``ALIC provides access to information on American history and government, archival administration, information management, and government documents to NARA staff, archives and records management professionals, and the general public.''

ALICE
Adiabatic Low-energy Injection and (inertial plasma) Confinement Experiment.

A Link
Access Link. SS7 term for an interconnection between a signal transfer point (STP) and either a signal control point (SCP; a database) or a signal switching point (SSP).

ALISE
Association for Library and Information Science Education.

ALIT
Automatic Line Insulation Test.

alive day
A term common among military personnel who survive major injury. It's the day, or the anniversary of the day, that you were seriously injured (and quite possibly maimed for life) but didn't die.

ALIVH
Any-Layer Inner Via Hole. A Matsushita-trademarked stacked-type substrate technology for microelectronic interconnnects. In microelectronics, a via is a vertical conductor above the semiconductor (i.e., one perpendicular to the top surface of the semiconductor).

ALIWeb
Archie-Like Indexing of the Web.

ALJ
Administrative-Law Judge. A hearings officer who presides over appeals of bureaucratic decisions.

Alk
ALKalinity. This particular usage seems to be common in the soil and water-treatment fields. Chemists generally use pOH or more commonly pH.

alkali
A term whose precise semantic range has varied. Most loosely, it means a base, q.v.

There are even some chemists who use the word that loosely, but minimally careful use usually applies the term only to inorganic bases. The strictest usage, and not an uncommon one, applies the term only to the hydroxides of alkali metals. Slightly looser usage includes ammonia and hydroxides of alkaline earths.

The potassium entry (K) has some etymology of the term.

There is obviously much confusion on the distinction between base and alkali, and I've even seen alkali defined as a base in aqueous solution.

alkali metals
Metals in group IA of the Periodic table (Li, Na, K, Rb, Cs, Fr). (That's also called group 1 in the currently recommended international labeling of the table.) Alkali metals tend to diffuse strongly in silicon, causing a problem described at the sodium entry.

The alkali metals are the metals whose hydroxides are the alkalis in the strictest sense of that term. Alkali metals are extremely electronegative, so their compounds are generally basic.

It seems no one ever expects alkali metals to have any interesting biological activity. I can think of two instances:

  1. Lithium. John F. J. Cade discovered the psychotherapeutic utility of lithium accidentally. The way he stumbled on this was to notice, first, that the urine of psychiatric-ward patients with bipolar disorder was especially toxic to guinea pigs. Suspecting uric acid (an excess of which is indeed toxic, as gout sufferers are aware), he began doing experiments with the organic salt lithium urate. He only used the lithium salt because lithium urate is the most soluble urate. Instead, he found that the guinea pigs were sedated. He eventually traced this back to the lithium. There's more about this story in the Li entry.
  2. Sodium. The sense of ``salt'' determined by taste buds is now known to be a response to sodium ions. Early experiments, however, seemed to suggest that the sensation of saltiness was due to chlorine (Cl) ions. The strongest evidence came from the fact that sodium acetate tasted much less salty than sodium chloride. As it happens, however, the weaker salt taste of sodium acetate is due to its lower ionization coefficient: the same molarity of sodium acetate solute as sodium chloride solute leads to a lower concentration of sodium ions.

alkaline earths
In current usage, the alkaline earths are the metals in group IIA of the periodic table (Be, Mg, Ca, Sr, Ba, Ra). (That would be group 2 in the currently recommended international labeling of the table.)

Originally, the term alkaline earth applied not to metals but to their oxides, and then only to the oxides of three metals -- calcium (Ca), strontium (Sr), and barium (Ba). It referred to oxides whose properties were intermediate between those of the alkalis and the ordinary ``earths.'' The term was in use long before the periodic table and before the discovery of radium (Ra), and so reflected a practical empirical orientation. Subsequently, the term's usage expanded to include magnesium (Mg) and radium, and what the heck, let's let beryllium (Be) into the club, too. This evolution did not reflect a change in our understanding of the chemical properties of the group members so much as an evolution towards a more theorrrrretical orrrrientation based on the periodic table or the atomic structure.

The alkaline earth metals have the odd property of increasing solubility with decreasing temperature. Normally, one only expects gases to have increased solubility at low temperature.

For a modern example showing the similarity of the alkaline earths in the earlier restrictive definition, see the CMR entry.

All
The title of a Collective Soul song. It has the hook ``Foo can give you / Foo can do / Foo wish for when I'm with you,'' where Foo is ``All is all I.''

ALLC
Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. Founded in 1973 ``with the purpose of supporting the application of computing in the study of language and literature.'' They co-sponsor a major annual conference with ACH, in Europe in even years, in North America in even years. A couple of those are listed at the ACH entry.

all day
Life sentence. [Prison slang. For more prison slang, see A Prisoner's Dictionary.]

Cf. kalpa, Life+50.

all day
Many larger restaurants have a kitchen manager whose job is to coordinate the activities of the various cooks. In this situation, the kitchen manager may call out orders, or the entire set of orders, rather than have cooks read the tickets. The phrase ``all day'' is jargon often used to indicate the end of an order or the orders.

There is some disagreement regarding the origin of this usage of the phrase ``all day,'' but I don't think it's worth a lot of speculation. Restaurant personnel are not known for their linguistic skills. Set aside the ``Belgium waffles,'' ``with au jus,'' ``bake scrod,'' and other menu solecisms. Once I mentioned to S. (a restaurant hostess I know) an observation I had made regarding books. I had noticed that when I came into the restaurant with a book to read, the probability that a waitress would mention it or ask me about it was an increasing function of the book's size. S. suggested that this was because -- not to put too fine a point on it -- waitresses are not the kind of people who read big books. Okay, maybe this isn't such a stunning observation. By way of compensation, S. herself is a pretty stunning observation. Maybe I was hoping she'd say that women like men with a big one. (``Then I whip out my big ten inch... record of the band that plays the blues.'') For a waitress who wrote a book, see the Waiting entry.

All dressed up and no place to go
I mentioned to K. that she and S. were the two hostesses who had the hardest time with the boredom of the job, and she replied that she and S. were the only ones who dressed up -- the others didn't care if their clothes didn't match or anything. I don't think that's the entire story, but it's a relevant datum.

That conversation also reminded me that women seem to expect men to notice their shoes. Sure, I noticed that she was taller that day and teetered into me, but I didn't think of checking out the stilettos (which would be an all-around funnier word as an -es plural). Honey, you need to discuss this with a leg man. If my eyes are going to stop for refreshment, it's not going to happen that far south. For more on restaurant-employee attire, and darts rather than stilettoes, see the black bra entry.

This entry took on added significance (for me, if not for you) six months later. K. started working as a waitress at Hooters. She told me the tips are better there. I asked if that was because the food was a little more expensive or because they sold more alcohol. She deadpanned that it was because of ``the uniform.''

All E.R.
All England Law Reports.

Allen Bradley
Here.

Allen keys
Also ``Allen tools.'' Hexagonal cross-section rod stock, bent in the form of an ell. Not to be confused with homonym Alan Keyes.

All Hallows Day
Alternative name for All Saints' Day. See the entry for that, as it's developing into a better-than-average entry.

All letters will be answered.
Personalsese, `All letters will be answered eventually if we live that long.'

``All Of Me''
John Legend's song about snorkeling. The title refers to the fact that in snorkeling, the swimmer is completely submerged. The key lyric (the ``hook,'' get it?) is ``My head's under water / But I'm breathing fine.'' (John Legend himself claims he wrote it as a love song for his bride, supermodel Chrissy Teigen. He has to stick by that now, even though it doesn't explain the lyrics. What happened was that he sang it for her when it was new. Then as he was explaining ``It's a song about my love of sn--'' she screamed ``OH, IT'S ABOUT US! YOU'RE SO ROMANTIC!'' So he was stuck. At that point he had no choice but propose, or risk her eyes going permanently out of focus. You'd have done the same.)

Ironically, another recent snorkeling song (by Sara Bareilles; see the music for snorkeling entry) includes the lyric ``I'm not going to write you a love song.''

allophone
  1. In linguistics: one of two or more alternate pronunciations, like the yoo and oo pronunciations of ``ew'' in the word news (i.e., in /nju:z/ and /nu:z/). In other words, alternate phonetics (more technically alternate phones) of a single phoneme. More at the emic entry.
        The earliest quotation that the OED2 gives for allophone is of Whorf, dating from 1938. They quote from Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. J.B. Carroll. Carroll commented that ``Whorf ... was apparently the first to propose the term `allophone,' now in common use among linguistic [`]scientists['].''
  2. In Canada: referring to persons who speak something other than English, French, or Québécois.
        In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Charles Baskerville dies and his baronetcy is inherited by his nephew Henry, who has been farming in Canada. The first time Sir Henry takes his leave of Sherlock Holmes, he says ``Au revoir and good morning.'' (Here at the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve Research Centro, we strive to provide you with the most timely, relevant, and obscure information, but we don't strive very hard.)

[Football icon]

all-purpose back
A player in American or Canadian football who can play both fullback and halfback positions. Abbreviated APB. See running back entry for some explanation.

all-purpose flour
Flour that you can use for both bread and cakes. Bread flour (also used for pizza) is made from high-gluten wheat, which can produce tough, chewy cakes. All-purpose flour is made with a mix of high- and low-gluten wheat.

[Football icon]

all-purpose yards
Yards rushing and receiving (in American and Canadian football). Abbreviated APY.

all-purpose ersatz erudition
  1. Viewed in a larger context, this picture is seen to be rather too simplistic.
  2. You have to define your terms.
  3. But by trying to probe more deeply, what we encounter is the underlying inadequacy of the definition.
  4. Is it really possible to say precisely? Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle tells us that to attempt too great a precision would be meaningless.
  5. I think one would have to be an expert in this precisely defined subject in order to say with any certainty.
  6. But ultimately: how do we really know?

What was it we were talking about?

All Saints' Day
The most interesting and challenging day of the year for barbers and hair stylists, when people come in expecting quick solutions to the problems they created by putting shoe polish, vaseline, wax, or spray paint in their hair for Halloween.

(Excuse me if this is already obvious to you, but everybody has to find out sometime, and for some, sometime is now: the word Halloween was originally a slurred form of Hallow E'en, short for All Hallows Evening, or Eve. All Hallows Day, as also All Souls Day, is an alternate name for All Saints Day. Yeah, the apostrophe is optional on the English name. All the religions that observe this holiday -- the major ones, anyway -- allow some poor spellers into heaven. But mind that you capitalize Holy Names and His Pronouns. You've been warned.)

Most customers dislike the really effective solution (shaving). I would recommend Goop®, that white detergent spread you use to clean roller-bearing packing grease off your hands after a brake job. An alternating sequence of amyl acetate and any rubbing alcohol might help, but I wouldn't use it on any hair that happened to be close to anyone's eyes.

All's well that ends well.
Dead men tell no tales.

All the marbles
What management usually holds and is missing a few of.

All the studies show that--
No, I haven't read alllll the studies, but generally speaking, the studies show that-- Well, no, actually, I haven't personally read any of the like, published details, but my Intro Sociology textbook says that--

all three major Scrabble dictionaries
Wherever this exact phrase occurs in this glossary, unless otherwise stated, it has the following meaning: the SOWPODS and TWL98 dictionaries, and the OSPD4. Wherever I write that a word is ``in all three major Scrabble dictionaries,'' it probably means that I checked my hard copy of OSPD4, which has definitions, and checked a web-based look-up tool mentioned at the SOWPODS and TWL entries (which gives no definitions) for the other two.

allyl
The radical CH3CHCH--.

ALM
Academia Latinoamericana Mayense. Intensive (immersion) Spanish and Mayan language school in Guatemala (.gt) since 1984. Students board with local families. No connection with the old ALM series of foreign-language textbooks.

ALM
AppWare-Loadable Module. (Capitalization following Novell NetWare convention.)

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ALM
Latin, Artium Liberalium Magister. `Master of Liberal Arts.'

The preceptor for my dorm in freshman year was Jay. When we asked Jay what his major was, he said `preunemployment.' My room-mate freshman year was Dennis. Dennis was a `premed.' Jay said Dennis looked like um, um, tip-of-my-tongue, led the descamisados in Argentina, united Italy, um, you know!, uh, I'll get back to this later. Yeah, Garibaldi! Except that Jay didn't have to struggle to recall. As you probably surmised, Jay was technically a History major. Of course, Dennis was `technically' a Biology major, because Rutgers didn't recognize `premed' as a formal major. They didn't recognize `preunemployment' either. I think the idea was not to stigmatize failure by making a formal admission that you were trying to get into some professional school. Instead you were supposed to pretend that you were in school because you had a sincere love of knowledge, and weren't really making any particular plans for after graduation. Jay went to law school, although only after falling in with the Moonies the summer after his senior year, and being rescued by Art, who claimed to be `predent' but went to med school instead. I don't know what story he gave the Moonie sentries.

ALM
Asset-and-Liability Management.

ALM
Asynchronous Line Multiplexer. A device that connects terminals or other serial-interface devices to network file servers or workstations that preferentially use parallel communication. Also known as ``Multiple Terminal Interface (MTI).''

A-LM, ALM
Audio-Lingual Materials. A series of foreign-language textbooks (Spanish, French, and German for English-speakers, at least) and supporting materials marketed by Harcourt Brace in the 1960's and 70's.

AL-MAS
Al-Masaq. Published by the Society for the Study of the Medieval Mediterranean and ``covers all aspects of the Islamic Mediterranean culture from the second to the ninth AH / eighth to the fifteenth centuries AD. It is concerned with fostering interdisciplinary and cross-cultural investigation of the Mediterranean region, creating a forum for ideas and encouraging debate on the influence of Islamic culture in the Mediterranean.''

almond powder
Almond soaps are specialty soaps typically recommended for washing the face. These almond soaps are made with almonds -- the nuts -- and almond oil. In the process of making such soaps, one grinds up almonds into a powder. This is powder contains a lot of oil, like most nuts, and that oil is converted into oil in the usual way by the saponification process. This is does not depend for its effectiveness on the detergent properties of unsaponified almond, and I wonder just how effective it may be. It is not the same almond powder that was traditionally used to clean the face. My grandmother used Mandel Kleie (German for `almond bran' or `almond aril'). It has its own mild detergent effect, and it also seems to soften the water. The whole point of using it was that by relying on a natural detergent rather than soap, one avoided the harsh alkalinity of the unreacted or unneutralized lye used in soap manufacture. A consistent modern application is in the use of almond paste (also sandalwood and chick-pea creams) to clean facial pimples.

For another alternative natural detergent, see this QS entry.

almost
They say that ``almost'' only counts in horseshoes and suicide bombings. Something like that. (Used to be hand grenades -- common theme of things tossed.) Hmm, maybe I'm thinking of ``close.'' Whatever. But what they don't tell you is that almost is a versatile word that can turn any unfulfilled fantasy into a flattering claim that isn't overly easy to demonstrate is false. For example, the guy behind the counter attends a local community college but almost got into Harvard. It's almost a true, anyway. [I'm not going to tell you which counter because of a combination of factors. Namely: (a) I value my health, and (b) he also was just an inch too short for the (non-Ivy) football team, and that one is almost believable.]

According to a potato chip I read recently (honest -- see the bongo entry for details), almost is the longest English word whose letters are in alphabetical order. In fact, that's not even almost true. A very practical and useful ``Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia'' reports that ``AEGILOPS (alternate spelling of egilops, an ulcer in a part of the eye) is apparently the longest word'' in Webster's New International Dictionary, 2/e, that consists of letters in alphabetical order. There you go.

ALMR
Association of Lighting and Mercury Recyclers.

almucantar, almucantar, almucantara
A small circle parallel to the horizon. Yes, the horizon is a circle. Look around. It's a great one, if you know what I mean.

almug
A precious wood mentioned in the Bible (according to OSPD4). Apparently there are still a few bits of it scattered in the Scrabble forest. The plural form is almugs; the metathetic forms algum and algums are also accepted.

almukantara
Almucantar -- a small circle parallel to the horizon.

ALN
Asynchronous Learning Network[s]. You've heard of ``learning at your own pace''? Maybe this is it. Hmmm. Maybe not. See JALN.

Alnico
A class of iron alloys with aluminum (Al), nickel (Ni), cobalt (Co), copper (Cu) and sometimes titanium (Ti), developed for military electric motor applications in WWII, still popular for PMDC motors. They have the poorest resistance to demagnetization of any commonly used PMDC field magnets.

The original alnico alloys -- Alnico I through Alnico V -- contained, as the name implies, only Al, Ni, and Co in addition to Fe.

ALO
Accreditation Liaison Officer.

ALOA
ALabama Optometric Association. Does this look like a grass skirt?

ALOC
Acute Loss Of Consciousness. (Acute in medical usage means of sudden onset.)

As we metallic types like to say, ``Bang yer head!''

Aloha
Very simple network protocol in which user blithely transmits whenever it has data. Sort of like a drunk at a party, except that it waits until it has something to say before uninhibitedly speaking. Also, it listens to determine if a collision occurred (determination by failure to pick up its own message from the central repeater, in networks that have one, or by failure to receive an ACK). In case of collision, retransmission attempt follows after random wait.

In a variation called slotted Aloha, transmitters are synchronized to begin transmitting at fixed times. This reduces collision rate by making collisions doozies, and in complementary fashion transforming many would-be fender-benders into near misses, i.e. safe noncollisions.

Cf. CSMA.

alopecia
Hair loss up to and including, but never exceeding complete baldness.

ALP
ALarion Press. Based in Boulder, Colorado. ``The history of ancient civilizations through colorful art and inventive architecture.''

In late May 2002, the Les Belles Lettres (yes! an excuse for a double definite article! oh, and a great tragedy) book warehouses burned down in Paris, and fires began in Colorado. Coincidence or conspiracy? What did Nostradamus say about this? And NIFC?

AlP
Aluminum Phosphide. (Let me add, Aluminium Phosphide for any of our Limey friends who had difficulty figuring that out.) An indirect-gap III-V semiconductor (2.45 eV), lattice constant of 5.467 Å. Both numbers close to those of GaP, so you might make a heterointerface, but why would you bother?

Alp
A mountain in Switzerland or thereabouts. How come I never see this singular form?

ALP
Australian Labor Party. Thus: not ``Labour.''

ALPA
Air Line Pilots Association. A union that also styles itself ``Air Line Pilots Association International.'' The extra word makes reference to the fact that it represents pilots across a multinational group of countries comprised of the US and Canada. As of Y2K, it represented 55,000 airline pilots at 51 airlines. Founded in 1931; it is chartered by the AFL-CIO. See also BALPA.

alpha
Short for alpha particle (q.v.).

Alpha chip
The very good 64-bit RISC processor and associated chip set designed by DEC as a successor to their enormously successful Vax series of machines. A VMS-like operating system (OS) was available to ease the transition back when it came out in the early 1990's, but it seems to have been a pain for the systems programmers. I think the Unix-type OS was Alpha/OSF, but I'm not sure. In 1998 the Alpha series of chips was sold along with most of the rest of DEC to Compaq, which was absorbed by HP later that year.

alpha particle
A 4He nucleus. Also simply called ``an alpha.'' Alpha-particle radiation is alpha rays (q.v.), and the latter term is the origin of the one defined in this entry.

alpha rays
Radiation consisting of alpha particles. Alpha particles are fully ionized ordinary helium atoms (i.e., they are 4He nuclei). Alpha particles are commonly emitted in the decay of heavy nuclei.

The term alpha rays (written α rays) was introduced by Ernest Rutherford in 1899 in the January issue of what was then called The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, and which is today called Philosophical Magazine. The article came at the beginning of that period in Rutherford's career that is known as ``the Canadian exile.'' Okay, that's probably not a common term, since I just coined it, but you can find some interesting pages if you google the phrase.

In any case, Rutherford was the Macdonald Professor of Physics at McGill starting in 1898. He took the job because it paid enough that he could afford to marry his fiancée from back home in New Zealand. (Her name was Mary Georgina Newton, interestingly enough; they were married in Christchurch in 1900.) He was so successful at McGill that in 1907 he was back in England as head of his own laboratory at Manchester. This is always a problem for lower-tier schools trying to move up: the very best young stars they manage to attract may leave as soon as their reputations let them (while some bad bets that the school has made accumulate as tenured deadwood). A few decades later, another Ernest physicist and future Nobel prizewinner -- Ernest Orlando Lawrence (1901-1958) -- took a similar risk. He felt unappreciated at Yale. (For one or two things, the chairman was slow to promote him, and this made it hard to recruit graduate students.) Like Rutherford, Lawrence in his late twenties went west to start over at an unknown school: University of California at Berkeley.

Anyway, this article by Rutherford is entitled ``Uranium Radiation and the Electrical Conduction produced by it'' (pp. 109-143). (Ions produced by the radiation -- what we often call ionizing radiation today -- produce an electric current that makes it possible to study radiation quantitatively.) Previous work by Röntgen and others had shown that X-rays (the rays Röntgen had discovered) consisted of rays with different abilities to penetrate matter (i.e., as we know now, they were emitted with different wavelengths). Rutherford conducted a similar study of radiation from uranium and found two components.

In detail, Rutherford found that the intensity of radiation that penetrated a number of thin sheets of material (mostly metal foils, see Dutch foil) did not fall off as a simple exponential function of the thickness of material traversed. The results were explainable in terms of two components.

These experiments show that the uranium radiation is complex, and that there are present at least two distinct types of radiation--one that is very readily absorbed, which will be termed for convenience the α radiation, and the other of a more penetrative character, which will be termed the β radiation.

It quickly became clear that the beta rays were deflected by a magnetic field, and they were eventually identified with the electrons that J.J. Thomson had identified with cathode rays in 1897. It was also early suggested (by Strutt, in Phil Trans. Roy. Soc. 1900) that alpha particles might be positively charged, and the suggestion was advanced again by Sir William Crookes (Procs. Roy. Soc. 1902). However, it was unclear for a couple of years whether alpha rays were charged at all (equivalently, deviable by a magnetic field). In a paper dispatched on May 7, 1902, Rutherford (with Mr. A.G. Grier) was still writing

For brevity and convenience we will call the non-deviable rays of all radioactive substances α rays and the deviable rays β rays.
[See ``Deviable Rays of Radioactive Substances,'' Phil. Mag. ser. 6, vol. 4, #21, pp. 315-330 (Sept. 1902), p. 325.]

The problem was simply one of measurement sensitivity. Beta particles have a charge-to-mass ratio 1836 times that of the proton, whereas alpha particles have a charge-to-mass ratio only about half that of the proton. Rutherford managed to get access to a sufficiently strong magnetic field later in 1902, resulting in ``The Magnetic and Electric Deviation of the easily absorbed Rays from Radium,'' which described ``some experiments which show that the α rays are deviable by a strong magnetic and electric field'' and of opposite sign to beta rays. The paper also, perhaps not coincidentally, introduced the term gamma rays. (This is discussed at the gamma rays entry, duh.)

ALPO
Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers.

ALPO
ALPO© dog food is a product of Friskies PetCare Company, Inc.

ALPSP
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. (Alternate URL here.) A UK group founded in 1972. Seminars are a big activity, and they publish a quarterly journal called Learned Publishing. They have an eponymous mailing list to which they issue their newsletter ALPSP Alert.

ALPSP ran a survey of contributors to scholarly journals. Questionnaires were sent to about 10,500 contributors to a range of journals published in ``the UK, the USA and elsewhere''; response was 30%. They found that we're not doing it for the money. Duh.

Somewhat more interesting: ``Offprints continue to be the main way in which authors disseminate their findings after publication, though 84% also claim to announce their results at conferences pre-publication.''
[If this seems inconsistent, buy the report. Almost certainly, the 84% fraction consists mostly of journal contributors who only present some of their work before publication. Moreover, conference audiences range in size. Though it is hard to generalize across the disciplines, I'd guess from conferences I've attended -- in fields ranging from semiconductor physics to mass communication -- that poster sessions and small (say 20-30 in attendance) sessions represent the majority of papers. (Small sessions would include most workshops, departmental seminars, and parallel sessions of larger conferences.) A typical presentation, to any size of audience, includes mostly people who are only peripherally involved in one's field of research. Offprints are better targeted.]

``...two-thirds of authors agree that the purpose of scholarly publishing does seem to be changing. It is seen as moving away from knowledge dissemination to building of an author's CV/resumé or reputation.''

The OECD is proud to be a member. What else is there left to aspire to?

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alr.
Latin aliter: `otherwise.'

ALR
Applause Learning Resources. ``Supplementary materials for the foreign language and ESL classroom.... a wide variety of products for instruction in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian, Japanese and ESL.''

ALS
Academic Libraries Survey.

ALS
Advanced Launch System.

ALS
Advanced Low-power Schottky. Prefix designation for a subfamily of TTL. Essentially the same technology as Advanced Schottky (AS), and with comparable power-delay product (PDP), but optimized for lower power consumption. This page from TI.

Als
Montreal ALouetteS. A team in the CFL (q.v.). See Al.

ALS
American Lithotripsy Society. It's ``a voluntary membership organization dedicated to addressing all issues regarding the management and treatment of stone disease including aspects of lithotripsy as a treatment modality for urinary stone disease. Originally organized in January, 1987, the ALS is a multispecialty society including physicians and allied health professionals affiliated with major lithotripsy sites throughout the United States.''

It's bigger, but I'd rather pass a milestone than a kidney stone.

ALS
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. ALS is known in the UK as Motor Neurone Disease (MND). Among people old enough to remember, or old enough to remember people old enough to remember, in the US ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Yankee first baseman Lou Gehrig set a great consecutive-games mark (2,130) that was only topped decades later by Cal Ripken, Jr. Gehrig ended the streak when he withdrew himself from the line-up in frustration at his increasingly poor performance. He didn't know then that he was dying of ALS.

als
German, `as.'

ALSA
ALS Association. See ALS entry.

AlSb
Aluminum Antimonide. An indirect-gap III-V semiconductor (1.63 eV), lattice constant of 6.136 Å.

ALSC
Association for Library Service to Children. A division of the ALA.

ALSC
The Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.

ALSEP
Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package. Apollo missions 12 and 14-17 each left an ALSEP on the Moon. These stations transmitted information about moonquakes and meteor impacts, lunar magnetic and gravitational fields, the Moon's internal temperature, and the Moon's (yes, limited) atmosphere for several years after the missions. Each ALSEP was powered by five SNAP-27 RTG's.

ALT
ALanaine aminoTransferase. Elevation of serum ALT levels is a sign of liver damage. The enzyme is released by hepatocytes (liver cells) when they die. Measurement of this level and that of AST were developed as tests for liver damage in 50's.

ALT
ALTernate.

ALT
ALum-To-clay ratio. I wouldn't make this up. It occurs in the water treatment field.

ALT
Assistant Language Teacher. In principle, this may have a broader meaning, but in practice it's a Japanese term for a native speaker of English (usually) who provides conversation practice in primary and/or secondary schools. An ALT typically assists in half a dozen schools, visiting each school once a week. What an ALT does in each school is largely under the control of the regular (almost always native Japanese) English teacher in each class.

The term was originally created by the Japanese Ministry of Education at the time of the creation of the JET Program, as the standard translation of a term in which ``language'' translates gaikokugo, which is literally `foreign language.' There are, in fact, some ALT's who provide assistance in foreign languages other than English. The JET Program is the ``Japan Exchange and Teaching Program,'' which exists mostly to bring ALT's to Japan and distribute them to participating school systems. The program also brings some CIR's (coordinators for international relations, with various duties) and SEA's (sports education advisors).

At any given time, the JET program has upwards of 4000 foreign participants, more than half from the US. It's the largest exchange teaching program in the world. Independently of this program, ALT's are also hired in smaller numbers by private schools in Japan, and by schools in prefectures that have opted out of the JET program.

One woman I know followed her Japanese boyfriend back to Japan from the US and taught as an ALT for a year or two. You have to have a bachelor's degree to participate in the program, but it doesn't matter what it's in. Hers was in Spanish, for example. In the time she was there, she never learned much Japanese. One thing she remembers well is that the ministry or the local board of ed or whatever occasionally tried to enrich the cultural experience of her and her fellow ALT's by subjecting them to icky raw meat.

ALT's have one-year contracts that can be renewed up to four times, though later renewals are harder. She broke up with her boyfriend, though, so it was never an issue. (And this is good because she's cute, so it's nice to have her back here.) But now she's getting a master's in English to become certified to teach ESL in the US. Don't tell me you're not interested in these details.

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ALT
The Association for Latin Teaching? You want ARLT.

ALTA
African Language Teachers Association.

ALTA
American Land Title Association. An industry association for title insurance companies.

ALTA
American Library Trustee Association. A division of the ALA. Cf. CLTA.

ALTA
The American Literary Translators Association.

Their twentieth annual conference was held at University of Texas at Dallas, October 30th - November 2nd, 1997.

The keynote speakers were Robert Fagles, talking about his translations of Homer, and Margaret Sayers Peden, translator of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Be it noted that Robert Fagles evokes very mixed feelings among classicists. His translations are more popular with students than with scholars.

[column] There were also bilingual readings (always a high point!), panels, and workshops. There may have been a workshop devoted to translating Greek and Latin, too.

This ALTA ``brochure is for the literary translator who is translating into English for the American audience and who has published very little or not at all. Drawing on the experience of some of America's most distinguished translators, it discusses the special obstacles faced by the literary translator, offers suggestions for preparing a translation for submission, and provides advice and resources that will help you become a better-informed and more successful literary translator.'' Cf. the not-necessarily-literary translation group ATA.

alta
Spanish (feminine form) for `high.'

AltaVista
Web search tool from digital.

Used to be one of the most complete (with Hotbot and Infoseek) and among the fastest, but it's become flakey since Digital was bought by Compaq. Anyway, the standard form needs a clear button:

Search and Display the Results

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alt. dieb.
Latin alternis diebus: `on alternate days' (i.e. every other day).

Altera
A company that makes PLD's and associated CAE logic development tools. According to their webpages, they shipped ``the world's first CMOS programmable logic chip in 1984.''

alternate Spelling
When you search ``All'' for ``Tori Spelling'' at <IMDb.com>, the approximate matches include a couple hits for the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. But maybe you wanted Tori Spelling. Yes, that's odd, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Fortunately, daddy produced `90210.' Of course, according to rumors of the usual level of reliability, she disguised her identity in casting call. She's just that kind of moral person.

Daddy (Aaron Spelling) was a producer of very successful television garbage. He executive-produced a drama called Charmed, about three sisters who talk about sexual situations and cast spells. In the opening credits, instead of appearing on screen complete, the names of the stars are spelled out by little boxes that roll across the screen. The little boxes also have little letters inside that spell out Charmed. More about this rot at this TNT entry.

Tori Spelling was named Victoria Davey Spelling at birth. In 2006 she starred in a comedy TV series that lasted 10 episodes. Loni Anderson played ``Kiki Spelling'' and Ariel Winter played ``Little Tori.'' I hope that wasn't another take-off on ``Mini-Me.''

The comedy was called ``So noTORIous.'' Tori Spelling seems to be involved in a lot of wordplay recently. In 2007, she and her husband Dean McDermott filmed a reality show for Oxygen called ``Tori & Dean: Inn Love.'' The ``Inn'' is a Bed and Breakfast that the couple own and operate in California. According to the Reality television entry at Wikipedia, when I visited on Einstein's birthday 2008, had this short definition: ``Reality television is a genre of television programming which presents purportedly unscripted dramatic or humorous situations, documents actual events, and features ordinary people instead of professional actors.'' Okay, so Tori and her actor husband Dean are batting .333 -- that's not so bad. More Tori te salutamus. Look, sometimes wordplay requires Miss Spelling.

alternating current
A power-company scam. They send you electrons, and then, a few milliseconds later, they take them back. And they charge you coming and going! They're selling you used electrons, over and over again, constantly.

Before this scam was concocted, electric power was distributed by single DC lines (the ground was ground, and it carried the return current). The primary application was arc lighting, which took up to 240 VDC. Since there was no practical and economical way to convert voltages, power delivery lines had to carry larger currents. Viewing the power-supply cable and the load as parts of a voltage divider, one sees that as load power consumption increases (more lights in parallel), the power cables must either bulk up or dissipate a progressively larger fraction of generated power. The initial solution was to build more and more closely spaced dynamos.

The ultimate solution was to supply high-voltage AC power and transform it down in voltage at substations. (Yeah, okay, so it wasn't entirely a scam.) There was initial resistance (ooh, sorry about that) to this idea from Edison and his backers, who had major capital and prestige invested in DC. (Therein lies the story of a fierce contest, which I hope to write up into an electric-chair entry.) A more practical problem was the absence of efficient AC motors. Nicola Tesla invented the first asynchronous AC motor and polyphase power delivery system, which solved most of the existing problems. The practicality of AC power systems was first demonstrated to the public at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. A more spectacular demonstration was made later at Niagara Falls. I don't remember what was more spectacular about it, but there was obviously plenty of hydroelectric power available there. The availability of cheap electric power promoted industrial development in the area. The production of shredded wheat is one application I can recall. A couple of others are mentioned at the ALCOA entry.

It is conventional to use this term, or more usually AC, even when negligible current is flowing. (Someone really wondered.) In principle, some small curent is always flowing anyway, even if it seems that all you have is alternating voltage, since the reactance of the line cannot be made infinite. That's if you want a reason, but most people would simply regard the no-current objection as a captious technicality. This discussion continues at the VAC entry.

Also in principle, alternating current might refer to any current or signal whose sign or direction varied in time. In practice, AC tends to refer to power supply (including what in Britain is called mains voltage) rather than to general electrical or communication signals, and these applications virtually always use a sinusoidally (time-)varying voltage of a single frequency. So AC generally implies sinusoidally varying.

Any reasonable continuous time-varying signal can be Fourier-analyzed into sinusoidal components. This is a very powerful technique, so the analysis of analog circuits is generally done in terms of frequency-dependent response to sinusoidal inputs. (Linear circuit response is completely specified by frequency-dependent response. Nonlinear circuit analysis uses the response to small, linear-regime signal deviations from one or more set points.)

alternative
Inferior.

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Altert.
  1. Altertum[s]. German, `[of] antiquity.'
  2. Altertumsforschung. German, `archaeology.'

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alt. hor.
Latin alternis horis: `alternate hours' (i.e., every other hour).

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alt. noc.
Latin alternis noctibus: `alternate nights' (i.e., every other night).

ALTY
Assisted Living TodaY. An information resource for seniors.

ALU
Arithmetic Logic Unit. More precisely Arithmetic and Logic Unit.

alumina
Al2O3.

alumina . HCl
Hydrochloric-acid-washed activated alumina.

alumina . HOH
Water-washed activated alumina.

aluminium
British name for aluminum (Al). The story of how this name jumped around is a bit involved, as you can imagine from the fact that we don't even tell it here. Aluminum is one of those elements whose names were derived from the minerals they were isolated from (alumina, in this instance). Let it at least be noted that Al is not alone among metals in having a name ending in -um but not -ium: Molybdenum, Tantalum and Platinum, as well as Aurum, Argentum, and others, if one will consider the names on which the chemical symbols are based. It went through a number of names, one of which was aluminum, proposed by Sir Humphrey Davies. At one point, however, aluminium was the accepted spelling and usage among chemists in the US as well as Britain. Still, in 1925 the American Chemical Society (ACS) voted to use Aluminum.

The issue of aluminum vs. aluminium even gets an entry in the aue FAQ, but no real answer. My guess is that as long as aluminum was difficult to reduce (i.e., before the Hall process), it was a chemists' curiosity, and long years of chemical practice (using -ium) were probably of no significance compared to isolated highly public news involving aluminum. I have in mind the completion of the Washington Monument, which was capped in 1884 with a pyramid of cast ``aluminum.'' The -num word was standard usage among miners and in other practical trades, just as the old name ``columbium'' is preferred by metallurgists to the chemists' ``niobium'' (vide Cb). See also the World Wide Words Aluminium versus Aluminum article.

aluminum can
Actually not a can but an aluminum-foil bag. Once it's open you should hold it at the top or you'll squeeze the fluid out.

alumni
Alumni of UB's Electrical Engineering Department include Gregory Jarvis (BS 1967), one of the astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion in 1986. Jarvis Hall is named after him.

Another UB alumnus, but not an EE, is Wolf Blitzer, who looked dashing in CNN's reportage of a Persian Gulf War (`Operation Desert Somethingorother') in 1991. He was temporarily immortalized by Gary Trudeau, who based a Doonesbury character on him. Later, he did a stint as a White House correspondent for CNN. The White House beat is a sinecure: you twiddle your thumbs until the press secretary is ready to spin the news, and then join everyone else in asking a different version of the question he doesn't want to answer.

ALVC
Advanced Low-Voltage CMOS (logic family). 0.6-µm technology for 3.3-V logic levels. Cf. earlier LVC. This page from TI.

Alverno
A four year women's college in Milwaukee, Alverno has achieved a remarkable hype-to-enrollment ratio by repackaging tests and quizzes as ``assessing for competence'' and other brilliant nothingness.

I'm sorry, that should be ``four-year liberal arts college for women.'' You probably thought it was a four-year engineering college for women.

ALVMA
Alabama Veterinary Medical Association.

AM
Active Messages. A feature on some parallel computers.

AM
Active Monitor.

AM
Administrative Module. I don't know; this makes me think of The Paddle.

AM
Air Mass. This doesn't have to do with the mass of air per se, but with the effects of absorption and reflection on the light from the sun, arriving as God intended, to impinge on His solar cells; vide AMO, AM1, AM2.

AM
Aluminum (Al) Matting. Laid down to produce instant airstrip.

Am
Americium, at atomic number 95. Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

aM, a.M.
German, am Main: `on [the river] Main.' As in Frankfurt aM, the larger city on the Main River, distinguished from Frankfurt an der Oder, a town on the Oder.

The spelling of Frankfurt in English has undergone a slight evolution from `Frankfort' to `Frankfurt,' principally in the 1980's or 1990's. For more detail, see the Frankfort entry.

The largest book fair in the world is the annual one-week Frankfurt Buchmesse, held during October (occasionally during or starting in September), with many thousands of exhibitors and a few hundred thousand visitors.

Am
AMos. A Jewish prophet and an OT book.

AM
Amplitude Modulation.

A&M
Agricultural and Mechanical.

A&M
Alpert and Moss. See A&M Records entry.

A&M
Ancient and Medieval.

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A.M., AM
Latin, Anno Martyrum: `[in] the year of the martyrs.' Designates dates in the Coptic Christian calendar. The first year of this calendar, 1 AM, began on August 29, 284 AD (Julian). That was the day of Diocletian's military election as Emperor; Diocletian's reign marked the height of pagan Roman persecution of Christians. (Of course, once Constantine and his successors made Christianity legal and increasingly privileged, the persecution of Christians increased, as the orthodox pursued the heterodox.) The pagan persecution of Christians is described in a History of the Coptic Orthodox Church by Father Marcos A. Marcos.

The Coptic calendar year has 13 months, 12 of 30 days and one of 5 days (6 in leap years). The French revolutionary calendar was similar, but the five or six intercalary days, which also came consecutively, were not designated a month. The traditional ``Egyptian year'' used for certain astronomical calculations in antiquity was exactly 360 days long, although the length of a real year was much more accurately known.

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A.M., AM
Latin, Annus Mundi or Anno Mundi: `[in] the year of the world.' That is, (in) the first year of the world's existence.

Note on the Latin: annus is the nominative form of the Latin word for year -- the form used when year is the subject of its clause. English is rather uninflected, and in particular, nouns are only inflected to indicate number and to distinguish the possessive case -- e.g., year becomes year's. (The possessive case corresponds roughly to the genitive case in European languages that have more extensive noun inflection, most prominently the Slavic languages.) The standard ``articulation'' of the cases for simple nouns that are borrowed from well-known languages like Latin is to use the nominative form for all cases in English. Thus, for example, we write not only

This is my vita. [predicate nominative]
but also
I lived my vita. [oblique case]
even though in the corresponding Latin sentence the word vita (`life') would take the accusative form vitam.

When a Latin noun phrase is imported, it is normally in the nominative case as well. That means that the base noun is in the nominative, but if other nouns occur they generally are not. An example is curriculum vitae (`course of life' or `life's course,' more at CV), which is used synonymously with vita in English. Here curriculum (`running' or `course,' as in a race) is a nominative form, but vita appears in its genitive form vitae (`life's' or `of life'). The genitive form is very common in these situations. English now most commonly creates compound nouns by using nouns as adjectives (called ``attributive noun'' in this function), rather than with possessive constructions: life history rather than life's history. The possessive form and related constructions used to be more common in English and continue to be more common in continental languages. In Latin and other highly inflected languages, the attributive noun has to be in some case, and that case is often the genitive, so the distinction sort of disappears.

In Latin as in English, inflections appear mostly as modified endings. Thus, the genitive forms of nouns and pronouns in English usually require the word to end in an ess (with some complications involving apostrophes, etc.) and present-participle verbs are the infinitive forms inflected with the suffix -ing. [German uses a -d added to the infinitive ending -en, so present participles end in -end (you could think of that as a mnemonic). At the time that the Scottish and English crowns were united, Scottish present participles ended in -and. The conversion of -and to -ing, along with various other systematic changes, took about a century.]

Latin inflections are about as systematic as those of English, but they are complicated by the fact that different classes of words are inflected differently. For example, Latin has four classes of verbs. These are inflected by rules that depend slightly on the verb class. Verb inflection is called conjugation; to ``give the conjugation'' of a verb is to give its various forms. (In Spanish, the four classes collapsed into three. All present participles in Spanish end in -iendo or -ando. The occurrence of -nd- in both Germanic and Romance (and Latin) present participles is probably not a coincidence, but I haven't checked. Scottish used to form present participles with an -and ending. In English, use of the nominalizing ending -ing (cognate with the German nominalizing ending -ung) expanded and replaced the native -nd present-participial ending. It took about a century for the -and form to disappear in Scottish after the political (and substantially linguistic) union with England and Wales.

There are classes of nouns in Latin just as there are classes of verbs. These classes are called declensions. There are five declensions, and each has a unique genitive ending for singular nouns. The other endings (for nominative, dative, accusative, and ablative cases) are more complicated, in that they also depend on grammatical gender. By convention, Latin dictionaries list the nominative form of a noun as headword, followed by its genitive ending and its gender, which is just enough information to indicate which set of inflections should be used. Thus, for example, the entry for vita begins "vita, -ae, f." Thus, the nominative and genitive singular forms are vita and vitae, as indicated above. The -ae singular genitive ending indicates that vita is a first-declension noun, and as it happens almost all first declension nouns are feminine ("f.").

The word for world (or universe) in Latin is mundus, and its entry begins "mundus, -i, m." We know immediately that the genitive singular form (`world's' or `of the world') is mundi, as in the phrases anno mundi and annus mundi, nominal subject of this wildly distended entry. Most second-declension nouns are masculine (m.) like mundus or neuter (n.) like curriculum ("curriculum, -i, n.").

The word annus means circuit, and very commonly the circuit of the sun, or year. Like mundus, it is a second-declension masculine noun (dictionary entry begins "annus, -i, m."). Thus, according to the rule stated above for noun phrases, the phrase `year of the world' comes over from Latin as annus mundi with nominative annus and genitive mundi. Not every unnaturalized Latin phrase in English is a noun phrase, however. Anno mundi is an adverbial of time. It originally occurred in medieval Latin sentences as ``... anno mundi MMMM,'' where anno is the ablative form of annus. This meant `... in the four-thousandth year of the world' [the last year of the fourth millennium]. It might be abbreviated ``A.M. MMMM'' (or ``MMMM A.M.''; word order is looser in Latin than in English, because inflections indicate syntactical relations). In translation of the text, the abbreviation was typically left in its original form: ``... 4000 A.M.''

You know, we're just about getting to the interesting part, but I'm running out of steam. Briefly: the precise date and even moment of the creation of the world was extremely important in Christian eschatology, because of the theory that world history was divided into thousand-year periods paralleling the seven days of creation. Hence the term ``millenarianism.'' At the end of six thousand years, there would begin a thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth. These would correspond to the first six days of creation and the Lord's resting on the seventh day. There were hundreds of well-known attempts to compute the A.M. on the basis of history as recorded in the Bible. These exact calculations disagreed somewhat -- by over a thousand years -- in part because the task is impossible: there isn't enough detailed information in the Bible.

Or so it seems to me. The eyes of faith, however, have seen -- or imagined they've seen -- things I have not. Those other things were auxiliary assumptions in which there seemed to be good reason to believe -- at the time. Over the course of a few hundred years these pious scholars tended to discover that the apocalypse was nigh. Repent! When the world failed to end at the appointed time, wiser scholarly chronologists went back to work and soon determined that the end was again nigh. The pattern continues to this day, and when hundreds of people die as a result (as happened in Uganda in March 2000), it's not very funny.

In addition to the exact calculations that had the world ending tomorrow repeatedly over the past few hundred years, there were also exact calculations based on the fact that the birth of Jesus marked the beginning of the last -- no wait, the second-to-last -- millennium before the apocalypse. There are some, ah, difficulties with the gospel stories that make it hard to establish a precise date, and anyway the historical record is a bit sparse, so obviously the way to get things exact is to use the standard methods of Biblical exegesis to determine the exact A.M., and work from there. Somehow, those who believed correctly that Jesus's birth marked the beginning of a millennium were enabled to make the correct auxiliary assumptions, and corroborated with miraculous accuracy that Jesus was born in 5001 A.M. (these calculations were correct as recently as 1400) and later corroborated with miraculous accuracy that Jesus was born in 4001 A.M. Those who believed the original calculations of Dennis the Short, who defined the A.D. era, determined that 4001 A.M. coincided with 1 A.D.; others found somewhat different correspondences. Apparently 1 A.D. = 4001 A.M. is popular with some Masons, who denote A.M. by A.L. In the English-speaking world today, the best known of those estimates is that of Bishop Ussher, who computed that 1 A.M. began in 4004 B.C., so the world ended in 1998 (around Thanksgiving, I think it was).

The Jewish calendar also assigns the year one to the creation of the world, although without assigning any special significance to the millennial years (and without using the notation ``A.M.''). The first day of year one, the first of Tishri, began on sunset of September 6, 3761 BCE by Julian calendar reckoning, although the concept of sunset before the creation of the sun is a bit deep for me. (Extrapolating back before 1582 according to the current Gregorian calendar rules, that would have been October 6.)

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A. M.
Latin, Annus Mirabilis: `miraculous year.' The year 1666 (103 plus the number of the beast), which saw English successes over the Dutch, and the great fire of London. Each conveniently cleared the field for new British development.

Interestingly, in that year Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, came out with The Description of the New World Called the Blazing World. (It's an antiscientific parody.)

See also the 1963 entry.

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AM, A.M.
Ante Meridiem. [Lat.: Before the Meridian.] The twelve hours preceding noon. ``12:00 AM'' is understood to be midnight, probably because 12:00:01 AM is a second after midnight. If this sort of arbitrary convention thing excites you, you'll get a real kick out of the Abend entry.

Actually, the 12 AM convention is not universally accepted. Using a convenience sample of about five people in FitzPatrick Hall, I determined conclusively that there are two sharply defined groups of people:

  1. Those who consider 12 AM to be midnight by convention.
  2. Those who don't think there's a convention, but who if they see ``12:00 AM'' guess -- considering context'n'all -- that it probably means midnight.
My automobile insurance policy usually runs from 12:00 AM in some well-defined time zone.

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a. m.
Latin, anus mirabilis: `miraculous, um, aperture.' Not at all the same as callipygian. More like A. M. mischievously misunderstood.

.am
(Domain name code for) Armenia. Yerevan is the capital. The Yerevan Physics Institute has a W3 server. So does the Armenian Government, but it's much slower. Why don't you change your research topic from Armenian government to Armenian physics?

In 1999, http://www.webmasters.am/ held a contest for the best websites in Armenia. Probably an interesting place to look for Armenian stuff. There's an Armenian Freenet, which ``provides free Internet access and training services for non-profit, governmental and educational organizations of Armenia, as well as individuals.'' Both the contest and the freenet are sponsored by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) country office in Armenia.

AM radio stations just don't seem to get as much respect nowadays as FM radio stations. Perhaps that explains why the Federated States of Micronesia, with the .fm is beginning to cash in, but Armenia is not. Then again, maybe Armenia actually wants to use its national top-level domain.

FWIW, there's two-tier pricing for domains under the .am TLD:

Registration and first two years fees USD 250 for non-residents, USD 60 for residents (including VAT) and annual fee USD 50 for non-residents, USD 24 for residents (including VAT) thereafter payable in advance.

AM
{Aviation|Aerospace} Medicine. Some AM organizations listed in this glossary: AMSANZ, AsMA, CAMA, CAMI, IAMI, OAM.

AMA, ama
Against Medical Advice. Ironically enough.

AMA
Alberta Medical Association.

AMA
I was amazed to read the headline ``AMA and Nacho confirm merger.'' You'd think they'd be mortal enemies, or mortality enemies or something. What next -- a merger of Philip Morris and the American Heart Association? But it turned out that AMA was the Accident Management Association and Nacho the (UK's) National Association of Credit Hire Operators. The merged organization (est'd May 2010) calls itself ``The CHO.''

AMA
American Marketing Association.

AMA
American Medical Association. Only a minority of US physicians are members of the AMA. Different figures are claimed, but the highest recent estimates (2009-2011) I've seen say that about a third of physicians are AMA members. The lowest run to half that. I'm actually kind of curious about this, so I'll try to get something firm.

For now, I have a somewhat precise-sounding figure of (``about 17 percent of physicians belong to the AMA'') from an October 2009 article by the columnist Jack Kelly. It sounds precise; it would be more precise if one knew, say, whether retired physicians were included in the denominator. It's kind of a precise upper or lower bound, depending on what quantity you're interested in.

The table below is based on a May 2010 article by Andis Robeznieks in Modern Healthcare (``More AMA money, but ...; ... membership declines, margin lags '07: report''; ellipses in the original). Much of the information evidently came from the AMA's 2009 annual report, released ahead of the annual meeting in Chicago in June.

Year   Membership  Change from previous year
2006   239,000       
2007   241,000       +1%
2008   236,000       -2%
2009   228,000       -3%

The 2007 membership increase was the first in seven years, but it was achieved by giving 8,577 free memberships to first-year residents who had been student members the previous year.

The stereotype used to be that physicians worked until they dropped, and that they had no interests outside medicine anyway, so they would die of boredom if they retired. That's not consistent with my personal experience, however, and medicine is changing so fast now that one needs the energy of youth (or a rousing chemical simulacrum of it) to keep up with developments in many of the specialties. A couple of my relatives who were the first two women to graduate from the medical school in Breslau (around 1930) did volunteer work related to medicine after they retired, but a cardiologist we knew simply sold her practice and went skiing.

There's a putative muckraking book advertised by Putnam Berkley [sic] Group; the bulletized list of putative revelations is pretty reassuring. Less ``praising by faint damns'' than ``we didn't find anything interesting that you didn't already know about.'' Putnam Berkley Group belongs to MCA/Universal, the information conglomerate that gave us ``Waterworld.'' Sadly, Putnam Berkley appears to be a successor of that fine old house G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Cf. this other AMA acronym.

AMA
American Missionary Association. An antislavery society founded by Congregational ministers and laymen ion 1846. Before the Civil War, the AMA campaigned against slavery and urged disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It aided freedmen and fugitive slaves outside the slave states, established schools up to the university level for freedmen, and maintained missions in West Africa, Siam, Hawaii, Egypt, Jamaica, and elsewhere, and among Native Americans in the US and fugitive slaves in Canada. AMA schools were quickly established in the South following Union victory.

Straight College in New Orleans was founded by the AMA on June 12, 1869, as Straight University, offering instruction at the elementary level, then at secondary, collegiate, and professional levels. (Yes, I double-checked that sentence.) Less than one month later that 1869, on July 8, the Freedman's Aid Society (of the Methodist Episcopal Church) established the Union Normal School, which eventually became New Orleans University. On June 6, 1930, the two institutions merged to form Dillard University. Be it noted, since Dillard is an HBCU, that it and its predecessors accepted students and faculty of any race.

AMA
American Motorcycle Association. Sister organization: ATVA.

AMA
American Music Awards.

AMA
Arbeitsgemeinschaft Messwert(?)-Aufnehmer. German, `Working Group on Measuring Devices.' Maybe you could ask here.

AMA
Association of Mining Analysts (of the UK).

AMA
Australian Medical Association.

AMA
Automatic Message Accounting.

AMAA
American Medical Athletic Association. Formerly the American Medical Joggers Association, and now the professional division of the American Running Association, comprises ``doctors and allied health care professionals who are committed to enhancing the well-being of patients through the promotion of running and exercise.'' (That little slip reveals all: running isn't exercise -- it's just an accelerated aging strategy for joints and tendons.)

AMACR
Alpha-MethylAcyl-CoA Racemase.

amalgam
Alloy of mercury with one or more other metals.

amanda
Advanced [University of] Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. A Unix program.

AMANDA
Automated Messaging and Directory Assistance.

The following might not be worth its own glossary entry, but I have to say it somewhere: I have trouble keeping my Amandas and Ambers straight, but ``Am'' just doesn't sound like a natural-enough nickname. I think I would remember if anyone ever introduced herself with ``I'm Am.'' (But see the I-M-A-L entry.)

amanecer
Spanish, `to dawn.' Cf. amenazar. Note that before e (or i), the letter c represents the same sound as z throughout both Latin America and Castillian-speaking Spain, with the possible exception of certain districts in Andalucia. Before about 1850, amanezer probably occurred as a variant spelling of amanecer.

AMARV
Advanced MAneuverable Reentry Vehicle (MARV). We're talkin' guided missiles, here, not the space shuttle.

amas
`You love' in Latin and some Romance languages (whenever was this a more apt designation?) including Portuguese and Spanish.

AMAS
Australian Medical Acupuncture Society.

AMAST
Algebraic Methodology And Software Technology.

amatol
AMmonium nitrAte and trinitroTOLuene (TNT). It was used in the German V-1 and V-2 in WWII.

AMB
Asociación Mundial de Boxeo. Spanish, `World Boxing Association' (WBA).

AMBAC
Asociación Mexicana de Bibliotecarios, A.C. `Mexican Association of Librarians, Civil Association.' According to the homepage (my translation),
it is the oldest librarians' group of Mexico. Founded in 1924 with the name Asociación de Bibliotecarios Mexicanos [`Association of Mexican Librarians'], it acquired its current name and the status of a civil association in 1965. It has a presence throughout the nation and serves the following objectives: professional development of its members, and promotion and fostering of libraries, library service, and librarianship. The AMBAC maintains relations with numerous professional associations, and many of its members belong to one or more of them.

ambari, ambary
An East Indian plant, according to OSPD4. You can find ambaris (or ambaries) throughout the Scrabble tablelands.

amber
Fossilized tree resin. Typically the resin of coniferous trees.

Ninety percent of the world's commercial amber comes from just one site, the open-pit amber quarry at Yantarny on Kaliningrad's Baltic coast. Amber is the principal natural substance exhibiting triboelectricity, q.v.

AMBER
America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response. A backronym used -- for the Amber Alert system -- by the (US) National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Ontario has an Amber Alert system. Aww, it's so hard to prove a negative.... Well, according to a report received at SBF, the National Center's expansion (above) is not used in Ontario.

Amber Alert
An alert broadcast on the system known as the Amber plan. It is named after 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, who in 1996 was kidnapped from her Arlington (TX) neighborhood while riding her bicycle and found dead four days later. In the aftermath of that abduction and murder, local broadcast executives J.D. Freeman and Steve Mace, and Dee Anderson, then the Arlington police department's public information officer, created an emergency broadcast system for information about abducted and missing children believed to be in danger (essentially: nonfamily abductions and young or mentally impaired missing persons; implementations as of 2002 are still on a local basis, so precise conditions vary). The information is broadcast on radio and as a text crawl along the bottom of TV screens. Some states, such as Pennsylvania, also use their freeways' Variable Message Signs (VMS).

AMBHA
American Managed Behavioral Healthcare Association.

ambiguity
According to Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969):
``Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.''
Adorno is Spanish for `decoration,' but Adorno worked in Germany, where `decoration' is Schmuck. I count this as evidence against the nomenclature-is-destiny hypothesis.

To be more precise, Adorno worked in Frankfurt aM, and was part of the Frankfurt school.

Ambix, AMBIX
A title; the subtitle is Journal for the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry. Ambix is the Ancient Greek word that ultimately reentered European languages from Arabic as alembic; the alembic is a tool and arguably the best-recognized symbol of alchemy. For details, see weird alchemical glassware.

As of 2013, the title is apparently officially in mixed case (Ambix), but it is in all-caps on the cover, and in the past, the webpages of the society that published it (see below) consistently wrote it in all-caps, somewhat as the Time magazine website treats its title. I have seen it printed in all-caps in many other places as well. I haven't seen the practice explained, but I can think of one reason for it: the majuscule forms of the letters a, m, b, i, and x are the same as the corresponding Greek letters, so the Greek original and the Latin transliteration have an identical appearance. (In contrast, the minuscule forms are all different.)

There is an important limitation on the preceding statement about letter correspondence: it is true for all times and places for the first four letters, but for the last letter it is only true for the majority of the Greek-speaking world during the archaic period (i.e., the pre-classical period) and into the classical period. The reason is that the symbol that we call xi (following nu in the alphabet and in the Greek numerals, with a value of 60) was not widely used for spelling in archaic Greece. Instead, the letter we call chi, near the end of the alphabet (600 as a numeral), was used with different sound values. In Ionia in this period, the chi was evidently sounded like an aspirated version (/kh/) of the letter kappa, and xi represented a sibilated stop (/ks/). In most other places that used the Eastern Greek alphabet, including Euboea and much of the Greek mainland including Attica (the region around Athens), chi represented the ks sound. In the Western Greek alphabet, chi also had the ks sound. (Of course, the name of the letter was chi-iota no matter how you pronounced it.) The letter retained that sound in the Etruscan alphabet (a version of the Western Greek alphabet, and the name ``ex'' when it was adopted by the Romans.)

If I were a dialectologist of archaic Greek, I might be able to say how or whether the /kh/ sound was represented where chi was already taken for /ks/. They might have used a rough breathing mark (spiritus asper is the standard Latin name) as is done to indicate aspiration of the rho (hence all the rh's in the English spellings of many Greek-origin words), just as the Romans used ch to represent that sound in transliteration in borrowed words from classical Greek or from Koine, but maybe they simply didn't bother to indicate breathing for that point (velar) of articulation. Eventually, during the classical period, at least Attica adopted the xi and respelled words that had used the chi.

Members of SHAC receive Ambix as a benefit of membership. Ambix is currently published in March, July, and November. If anyone had asked me, I would have said that I heartily approve of this publication schedule.

Ambix is put out by Maney Publishing, which is celebrating Ambix as its Journal of the Month for March 2013. From today (March 2) until April 15, 2013, some of its content is available free. [The last three years, a historical post bella mundi special issue, and ``20 high-quality articles'' from the archives. That nicely infelicitous wording excites hope that other celebratory features will be unintentionally interesting.]

AMC
``All My Children.'' An ABC daytime soap opera (1970-2011). An application of television technology. Software. Do not confuse with ``My Three Sons,'' a TV series (1960-72) set at 837 Mill Street. Yes, this glossary contains some pretty essential information, but this probably isn't it. The newsgroup for AMC has an faq.

Set in the fictional East Coast suburb of Pine Valley, AMC story lines revolve around attractive young Erica Kane (played by attractive young Susan Lucci from 1970 to 2011) and her succession of husbands.

Palmer Cortlandt, a longtime character on AMC, owned a company called Cortlandt Electronics. He was played by James Mitchell, who died in January 2010. Kelly Ripa (a blonde sidekick like Vanna White, but she doesn't have to walk around so much) is an AMC alumna, and she was devastated when the show was canceled in April 2011. ``All My Children was more than a job,'' she said. ``It was my family. It was there that I met my husband; it was there when my first two children were born.'' But not all her children.

AMC
American Mathematics Competitions. Run by the Mathematics Association of America (MAA). Governed by the Committee on the American Mathematics Competitions (CAMC). Includes AJHSME, AHSME, AIME, and USAMO.

AMC
American Motors Corporation. Originally formed in 1954 from a merger of Hudson and Nash-Kelvinator. Here's a fond look back. Finally went out of business when Renault decided to cut its losses. Plants sold to Chrysler (1987), but they only continued the Jeep lines. Okay, they kept the Eagle line going for a few years too, but Chrysler hardly marketed it and it sold approximately zilch plus epsilon.

AMC
American Movie Classics. A cable TV channel. As of 2011, American Movie Classics Company, LLC, operates AMC Networks, which comprises AMC, IFC (Independent Film Channel), IFC Films, the Sundance Channel, and Wet v or We tv (``the women's network devoted to the wild ride of relationships during life's defining moments''). Wet v offers its fans an amusement called <guyspeak.com>, where they can ask (only dark-haired, I notice) ``real men questions about anything and get real answers.'' Does this dress make me look fat? Be honest, now! It's a free service; I guess accurate answers cost extra. You should have a look at our entry for indelible insouciance.

You know how, when you visit a foreign country, a lot of the TV programming seems, like, ``foreign''? There are all these locally famous stars you've never heard of or seen before, and their body language and facial expressions are hard to parse. Their smoldering stares must seem portentous to some, but you kind of look over your shoulder to see whom the look might be meant for. I always used to get that feeling when I traveled abroad, but now I can have the same feeling on the cheap by visiting places like the IFC website. To tell the truth, nowadays I get that where-am-I?-who-are-these-people? feeling all the time.

AMC
Army Materiel Command.

AMCAS
American Medical College Application Service. ``[A] non-profit, centralized application processing service for applicants to the first-year entering classes at participating U.S. medical schools. For the 2002 entering class, 115 medical schools and 2 programs are participating in AMCAS.''

The service is offered by the Association of American Medical Colleges [AAMC]. The words ``non-profit'' and ``service'' do not, individually or in concert, imply ``free'' (in the sense of gratis).

AMCD
Association of Managed Care Dentists. According to the homepage: ``Note, we were formerly called The Association of Managed Care Providers.''

AMCHAM, AmCham
AMerican CHAMber of Commerce. ``The American Chambers of Commerce Abroad ... advance the interests of American business overseas. They are voluntary associations of American companies and individuals doing business in a particular country, as well as firms and individuals of that country who operate in the United States. Currently [page last updated in early 2006], 104 AmChams in 91 countries are affiliated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.''

AMCHP
Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs.

AMC-LOGSA
Army Materiel Command - LOGistics Support Agency.

AMCP
Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy.

AMCP
Association of Managed Care Providers. The name of an organization that is now called the Association of Managed Care Dentists (AMCD).

AMD
Acid Mine Drainage. The phenomenon of acid production in the oxidation of pyrite. AMD is indicated by yellow boy, a yellow-brown precipitate of a complex ferric [i.e., Fe(III)] sulphate mineral.

AMD
Active Matrix Display.

AMD
Advanced Micro Devices. A microelectronics company. Has specialized in making Intel sort-of-clones. In Winter 1994 (almost a year before the Pentium ALU-error flap), they announced that they would be continuing to bring out 486-based products rather than following the Pentium track. For more, see the NexGen entry.

AMD
Age-related Macular Degeneration. The most common cause of legal blindness in people over the age of 55, according to the Foundation Fighting Blindness in Hunt Valley, Md. The macula is the central portion of the retina, contains the highest density of photoreceptors, so AMD causes blurred vision and a blind spot in the center of one's field of vision. Smoking seems to exacerbate it.

AMD
Ambulance Manufacturers Division. An ``affiliate division'' of the NTEA since 1986.

AMD
Antarctic Master Directory. A key component of ADDS.

AMD
Antisymmetrized Molecular Dynamics.

AMDA
American Medical Directors Association.

AMDA
The American Musical and Dramatic Academy.

Amdahl
Amdahl Corporation. IBM-besotted information systems software solutions. Oh, a bit of Sun Microsystems. Purchased by Fujitsu in 1997. The Amdahl brand was retired in 2003.

Amdahl's Rule
For every instruction per second of performance you need one byte of memory to hold the instruction and one bit per second of I/O. Not precise (depends on bus width, instruction length, etc.), but a part of thinking about computation as a plumbing problem. Cf. Gene Amdahl's rule with Seymour Cray's Rule

[column]

AMDG
Ad Maioram Dei Gloriam. Latin, `For the greater glory of God.'

It's a popular Jesuit (SJ) motto. Someone posted to the Classics list that he once heard a Dominican (OP) say ``I'll do it, but I won't do it ad majorem Dei gloriam because that's a Jesuit motto.

AMDIS
Australian Marine Data Information Service.

AMDM
ATM Multiplexer/DeMultiplexer.

AMDOC
``The AMDOC website, an initiative of the American Documentation Center at K.U. Leuven, is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Embassy in Brussels. Its aim is to serve as a portal site to a wide range of U.S. topics that are of interest to Belgian internet users, and especially to Belgian teachers and students. [Because, you know, it's so hard to get information about the US on the internet.] A separate section provides information on Belgium and on U.S.-Belgium relations for internet surfers from the U.S.
BLASA, the Belgian Luxembourg American Studies Association, which also co-ordinates the inter-university MA in American Studies, serves as an editorial board for the AMDOC website.''

AME
Accident-related Medical Expense[s].

AME
African Methodist Episcopal. There are two major churches with AME in their name, both of them first established as multiple-congregation organizations at the beginning of nineteenth century, by free blacks in Northern US cities. AME Church was founded in Philadelphia in 1787, and AME Zion Church was begun in 1796 in New York City. By 1821, the AME Zion Church had organized six congregations, located in New York, New Haven, Newark, and Philadelphia, into a common entity. They used the name of their oldest member congregation (AME Zion) to distinguish themselves from the Philadelphia-based AME. I'm not sure when the national AME church was organized. As of 1990, the AME Church has 3.3 million adherents and the AME Zion Church 1.1 million.

AMEC
AMericas, England, and the Continent, perhaps. AMEC was a UK construction company formed in the merger of the Fairclough and William Press groups in 1982. Apparently the company didn't start expanding internationally until the 1990's, and they don't explain the origin of the name, so there you are.

AMECE
Asociación Mexicana de Estándardes para el Comercio Electrónico.

AMECEA
Association of Member Episcopal Conferences of Eastern Africa. A Roman Catholic organization headquartered in Kenya. The AMECEA Pastoral Institute at Gaba publishes AFER.

AMEI
Association of Musical Electronics Industry. A Japanese industry association, which would explain the ungrammatical absence of the definite article and the amusing concept of musical electronics. As they say, English version is under construction.

Amen!
Sounds like a Shania Twain lyric.

amenazar
Spanish, `to threaten, menace.' Cf. amanecer.

American continent
For a long time (and still today in some places), the entire land mass of ``the Americas'' (from the Arctic all the way to the islands of Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America) was regarded as a single continent. For an example of the old view, here is the America entry from vol. I (pages unnumbered!) of Pantologia, published in London in 1813. [The original article had no paragraph breaks; these have been inserted for readability. In the following, all square-bracketed text is modern (SBF) commentary.]

   AMERICA.  (from Americus Vespucius, falsely said to be the first discoverer of this continent.)  One of the four parts of the world, and by much the largest.  [See our antarctick and Australia entries.]  It is bounded on all sides by the ocean, as appears from the latest discoveries; it being formerly supposed to join to the north-east part of Asia.  Americus Vespucius, from whom it took its name, was a Florentine, who having accompanied Ojeda, an enterprising Spanish adventurer, to America, and drawn up an amusing history of his voyage, published it, and it was read with admiration.  In his narrative, he had insinuated, that the glory of having first discovered the continent belonged to him.  This was in part believed; the country began to be called after the name of its supposed first discoverer; and the unaccountable caprice of mankind has perpetuated the error; though there is no doubt that not merely Columbus, but Behaim, and Cabot, had visited America many years before Vespucius.  (See BEHAIM, &c.) 

Many are the conjectures about the peopling of this vast continent; but we cannot relate them here; nor indeed is it greatly to be wished.  America is so long, that it takes in not only all the Torrid, but also the Temperate and part of the Frigid zones.  It is hard to say how many languages there are in America, a vast number being spoken by the different people in different parts; and as to religion, there is no giving any tolerable account of it in general, though some of the most civilized of the aborigines seem to have worshipped the sun.  [This (``the most civilized...'') probably refers to the Aztecs, who sacrificed as many as a thousand people a day to their sun god.]  The principal motive of the Spaniards in sending so many colonies there was the thirst for gold; and indeed they and the Portuguese are possessed of all those parts where it is found in the greatest plenty. 

This vast continent is divided into N. and S. America, which are joined by the isthmus of Darien. It has the loftiest mountains in the world, such as those that form the immense chain called the Andes; and the most stupendous river [sic], such as the river Amazon (``the mighty Orellana''), the ``sea-like Plata,'' the Oronoko, the Mississippi, the Illinois, the Misaures [presumably a French spelling for the Missouri; see the Mo. entry], the Ohio, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehannah, the Potomac, &c. 

Besides the aborigines, who inhabit the interior parts, and the United States of America, who possess some of the finest provinces that formerly belonged to Great Britain, the various European powers have rich and flourishing colonies here.  The American states are fifteen in number, each having a separate local government; but they are formed into one federal republic.  These states long flourished as provinces of Great Britain; but parliament attempting to tax them by its sole authority, without the intervention of their assemblies, a civil war ensued; a congress was formed, which, in 1776, disclaimed all dependence on the mother country; the French king entered into an alliance with them in 1778; the colonies, powerfully assisted by France, were successful; and Great Britain, in 1782, acknowledged their independence in preliminary articles of peace, finally ratified by the definitive treaty in 1783.  The Americans have since formed a new federal constitution.  [Although the preface of Pantologia is dated June 1813, it is well possible that this entry was written before the War of 1812.]

Between America (the New World) and the Old World, are several striking differences; the most remarkable of which is, the general predominance of cold throughout the whole extent of this vast country.  Here the rigour of the Frigid Zone extends over half that which should be temperate by its position, with regard to the same parallels of lattitude in the Old World: and even in those lattitudes where winter is scarcely felt on the Old Continent, it reigns with great severity in America, though but for a short period.  Nor does this cold, so prevalent in the New World, confine itself to the Temperate Zones, but extends its influence likewise to the Torrid Zone, considerably mitigating the excess of its heat. The natives of this vast country are in some respects different from those of the Old World; for the skins of all the men, except the Eskimaux, are of a red copper-colour; and they have no beards, or hair on any part of their bodies, except the head, where it is black, straight, and coarse.

In a country of such vast extent there are, no doubt, as great a variety of soils as there are of climates. In short, America may be called an immense treasure of nature, producing most, if not all, of the plants, grains, fruits, trees, woods, metals, minerals, &c. to be met with in the other parts of the world; and that not only in great, if not in greater quantities, but many of these in greater perfection. By the discovery of this country, the Europeans have derived many real and solid advantages.  Gold and silver have been more plentiful in the countries of Europe, since their connection with America, and the Materia Medica hath derived no small assistance from the productions of this continent.  The various districts which compose this vast country shall be treated of in their respective places: and the reader may farther consult the interesting works of Morse, Winterbotham, &c.

If the above has not distracted you and you're still wondering about the number of American continents, you may find enlightening the following excerpts from the seventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1842) America article:

    According to the geographical system adopted in the old world, America ought to be considered as two distinct continents, connected by the isthmus of Darien. Its two great divisions have evidently more of a defined and separate character than Africa and Asia, or than Asia and Europe; but though this arrangement may be very properly adopted for the purpose of description, it is too late now to think of assigning separate names to regions which have so long been known by a common appellation. ...

    The American continent, therefore, with its dependent islands [incl. Greenland], is fully four times as large as Europe, about one third larger than Africa, and almost one half less than Asia, if we include with the latter Australia and Polynesia.

In addition to correcting the erroneous area comparison of Pantologia, this later encyclopedia also avoids the incorrect claim that the highest summits are found in the Americas.

American fingering
In piano fingering, the practice of representing the thumb by the sign x. Distinguished from German fingering, in which the thumb is called the first finger. American fingering originated in Germany and is also called English fingering. In England at the time, German fingering was the rule.

American Legion
The American Legion is an organization for American veterans of wartime periods in the US armed forces.

American Mediterranean
A term coined by Baron Alexander von Humboldt for a coastal sector of the Gulf of Mexico, vaguely bounded by Caribbean islands, with two outlets: at the tip of Florida and at the cape of Catoche in Yucatan. An excellent example of the reflex to misunderstand the new by analogizing inappropriately from the old.

American Pie
A monster hit for Don McLean. Title song of an album released in mid-1971, it was first aired on June 26, 1971 to mark the closing of San Francisco's legendary Fillmore East. It spent seventeen weeks on the charts, four weeks at #1. The eight-plus-minute song is still popular among DJ's with bowel problems. (FWIW, ``Hey Jude'' runs a tad over seven minutes.)

The song is evidently a ballad telling a history of rock'n'roll, with numerous readily identified references to Buddy Holly. When it appeared, the song was subjected to repeated amateur analysis on the radio. In the years since, it has achieved FAQ status on rock newsgroups. In any given week, it is being discussed on at least one newsgroup. For example, sampling ( on AltaVista and DejaNews) at a randomly chosen moment (just now, in another window) I found that in the past seven days the discussion, or at least a cultural reference, has been visited upon

  1. alt.basement.graveyard,
  2. alt.books.stephen-king,
  3. alt.music.lyrics,
  4. alt.music.yes,
  5. misc.forsale.computers.pc-specific.software,
  6. rec.arts.tv.soaps.misc,
  7. rec.music.dylan,
  8. rec.music.makers.guitar.tablature,
  9. rec.music.marketplace.vinyl,
  10. rec.music.misc,
  11. soc.culture.singapore,
  12. and
  13. tw.bbs.rec.guitar,
not counting .sig quotes from the movie of the same name. As a benchmark for comparison, in the same period, Barbarella was only mentioned in
  1. news:de.alt.comics,
  2. de.rec.sf.perry-rhodan,
  3. news:fr.rec.arts.sf,
  4. rec.arts.movies.lists%2bsurveys,
  5. rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc,
  6. and
  7. soc.culture.italian,
not counting real people bearing that name. [It appears that Barbarella has less enduring resonance, but more widespread international appeal. Lacanian psychology is capable of explaining this all in terms I don't have the megabytes to serve, but I can give a serviceable alternative explanation in three words: tight plastic outerwear.]

Lori Lieberman saw Don McLean perform ``American Pie'' in a nightclub and was inspired to write a poem on the back of a napkin, which became the lyrics for the song ``Killing Me Softly'' by Norman Gimbel & Charles Fox, featured on Ms. Lieberman's first album. (The poem became the lyrics! I don't know what became of the napkin.) Later, Roberta Flack did a very successful cover of the song.

Bob Garfield, in one of the essays in his Waking Up Screaming From the American Dream: NPR's Roving Correspondent Reports From the Bumpy Road to Success (Scribner, 1997), tells the story of a man who believes that the lyrics to ``American Pie'' are a prophecy of Armageddon.

Americans
Attributed to A.E. Housman:
In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.

Attributed to Gamal Abdel Nasser:

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.

I dunno, this sounds like coincident foolishness to me, but could there be something to it?

AmeriCorps
A federally-funded program run by the Corporation for National Community Service. It was signed into law in 1993 by Pres. Clinton. As part of the ``stimulus package'' signed into law in April 2009, the program will be gradually expanded from the current 75,000 to 250,000 members in eight years' time. If the recession lasts eight years, that will be a very timely stimulus. AmeriCorps encompasses a wide variety of specific projects, but most of those I've read about are one or another form of fairly conventional social work.

AmeriCorps ``volunteers'' receive an average of over $15,000 a year in pay and benefits, and almost 90 percent go on to work for government agencies or nonprofit groups. So it's basically an internship in sanctimonious dogooding (which isn't to say that the targets of the dogooding don't need help, or that the programs don't actually do some good, though these things are rarely very well quantified).

Ameritech
Baby Bell for the eastern part of the midwest. Like all the rest, it is trying to establish itself more generally as an information technology company. See how they can inform you.

AMESLAN
AMErican Sign LANguage.

amethyst
A variety of quartz with a purple tint. Pure quartz is silica, SiO2, with a bandgap like about 8 eV, so it is transparent. The color of amethyst evidently arises from iron ions; 100 ppm corresponds to a fairly deep purple. Iron ions normally incorporate in quartz with a valence of 3+. In that oxidation state, the color is somewhere in the yellow/orange/brown range, and the mineral is called citrine. Most commercially available citrine is simply mined amethyst which has been heated to change the oxidation state of iron back down to 3+.

Apparently amethyst color develops when irradiation knocks Fe3+ ions into a configuration where they are stably Fe4+.

ametrine
AMEthyst and ciTRINE. A crystal mix of amethyst and citrine. Significant quantities are found only in Anahi mine in eastern Bolivia.

AMEX, Amex
AMerican stock EXchange. Smaller of the two big stock exchanges with physical trading floors in New York City. The other is the NYSE. In 1998, the Amex was purchased by the NASD, which already owned NASDAQ and was trying to become a ``market of markets.'' It didn't take, and starting in January 2002, the NASD was trying to unload the Amex. Amex members bought themselves out of the merger in 2004.

Amex Bank
A banking subsidiary of American Express (the US financial services company).

AMEXINC
Asociación Mexicana de Investigadores del Color, A.C. `Mexican Color Researchers Association,' a nonprofit organization. The membership includes psychologists, designers, painters, architects, physicists, publicists, and biologists. I'm not sure if the order of professions represents anything; I only note that it doesn't include stock brokers.

AMF
ACE Mobile Force. (NATO acronym.)

AMF
AIDS Medical Foundation. Founded in New York in April 1983 with essentially the same goals as its successor organization amfAR (q.v.).

AMF
Air Mass Flow (rate).

AMF
Alpha Methyl Fentanyl.

AMF
Alternative Medicine Foundation. ``More than half of the United States population, approximately 125 million Americans, suffers from a chronic illness -- conditions such as arthritis, allergies, pain, hypertension, depression, and digestive problems.
Conventional western medicine often cannot provide satisfactory solutions so people with chronic conditions increasingly turn to alternative therapies, such as acupuncture, herbs, mind/body techniques, homeopathy, massage, and more, to improve their quality of life.'' And so what this foundation is dedicated to doing is convincing them not to waste their money just because they're so desperate that they'll try anything and convince themselves that it works, profiting the quacks and increasing their ability to sell snake oil. What -- that's not what they do? Well... ``founded in March 1998 to provide responsible and reliable information about alternative medicine to the public and health professionals.''

(Incidentally, the last census (1990) before 1998 gave a total US population of 248.7 million. By 1998 all reasonable projections put the population above 260 million. I doubt this affects the ``[m]ore than half'' claim, since that is probably based on estimates of prevalence as percentages of the population.)

amfAR
The AMerican Foundation for AIDS Research. ``The [US's] leading nonprofit organization dedicated to the support of AIDS research, AIDS prevention, treatment education, and the advocacy of sound AIDS-related public policy.'' Formed in September 1985, by a merger of the AIDS Medical Foundation (AMF) and the National AIDS Research Foundation (NARF).

AM/FM
AM and FM radio receiver.

AM/FM
Automated Mapping and Facilities Management. A specialized kind of GIS application, used by public and private utilities, municipalities to keep track of properties that can usually be described by location, like buildings, roads, and distribution facilities (plumbing and cabling).

AM/FM International
A professional organization for AM/FM (see previous entry), headquartered in Aurora, Colorado. Name changed to Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA) to reflect more ambitious self-definition.

AMFP
Advanced Materials and Fluid Processes. A focus of technology transfer by JPL.

AMG
Affiliated Managers Group.

AMG
(Iterative) Algebraic Multi-Grid (differential-equation solver).

AMG
All-Movie Guide.

AMG
All-Music Guide.

AMH
Anatomically Modern Humans.

AMHS
Automated Material-Handling System. Try AMHSA in the UK, the MHIA and ITA in the US.

AMHS
Automated Message-Handling System.

AMHSA
Automated Material-Handling System Association. A UK industry association whose members manufacture in-house automated guided vehicles, unit load conveyors, high-speed sorting equipment, and storage and retrieval machines.

AMI
Acute Myocardial Infarction. I was going to make a pun based on ``acute'' being misread as ``a cute,'' but it's rather tired, given the widespread use of the word acute in medicine.

AMI
Alliance for the Mentally Ill. A list of state organizations is available from the national site.

AMI
Alternate Mark Inversion.

AMI
Academy of Molecular Imaging.

AMI
American Megatrends, Inc. Their business is ``cutting edge products and technology.'' Clarity is apparently not their business. They sell RAID controllers, motherboards, and BIOS (AMIBIOS) software, among other products.

AMI
American Microsystems, Inc.

AMI
American Monetary Institute. An organization that wants to abolish the Federal Reserve System and put control of the money supply back in the steady hands of the public.

AMI
Association of Medical Illustrators.

AMI
Association Montessori Internationale. Based in Amsterdam, named in French after a woman named in Italian -- way to confuse the kiddies! AMI was established in 1929 by Maria Montessori and was guided for more than 50 years by her son and close collaborator, Mario M. Montessori.

ami
`Friend' in French. Equivalent to Spanish amigo, both ultimately from the Latin amicus (see amicus curiae).

A cognate of ami in English is amity, from the French amitié. Earlier French forms had an ess (the OED2 gives 13th c. amistié, amisté, and 11th c. amistet, which is similar to the modern Spanish amistad). The ess sound in these words comes from a soft cee, typical in Vulgar Latin when a cee was followed by a closed vowel (e or i). The classical Latin for amity was amicitiam, but the OED conjectures a Vulgar Latin (accusative) amicitat-em (explaining the two dental consonants at the end of the Spanish and Old French forms). They support this by a comparison with the evolution of mendicus, Latin for `beggar.' I've read that after the disaster of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, hungry French soldiers contributed a new slang word for beggar to the Russian language: cher ami (lit.: `dear friend'). (I haven't been able to track this down in any handy Russian dictionary.) If you're reading this glossary thematically, your next entry should probably be faux ami.

AMIA
American Medical Informatics Association.

AMIA
La Asociación Mutualista Israelita Argentina. `Argentine Jewish Mutual Association.' Pronounced amiá. I.e., with consonantal i and stress on ult. Yeah, it's vague in Spanish too. It's the name of the big Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. In November 1947, when the United Nations voted to create the state of Israel, my mom went there to celebrate. Of course, amid the joy everyone knew that the Arabs were planning to attack the new state.

On July 18, 1994, an unexpected attack occurred at AMIA: a car bomb was set off outside the building, killing 85 and injuring hundreds. For years there have been rumors of Iranian government complicity, and official investigation of Iranian nationals, but negligible progress on the case. Claims have also been reported in the press that the Iranians paid then-president Carlos Menem a bribe of ten million dollars (in a secret Swiss bank account, you know the routine) to derail the investigation. As of March 2003, four Iranian diplomats are wanted in connection with the attack. (Interpol arrest warrants issued March 7 by Judge Galeano.)

AMIA
Association of Moving Image Archivists.

amicus curiae
Latin, `Friend of the court.' From L. amicus (`friend') and Portug. curiare (`curry [favor]') < Carib. kurari (`poison pen'). For your benefit, the preceding derivation is more accurate than the true etymology. In legal jargon it's just called an amicus. The Polish term is legal buttinski.

amide, -amide, amido-
The term amide is used for two slightly different classes of compound resembling ammonia.
  1. Inorganic amides are ammonia molecules in which one or more metal cations replaces a hydrogen, such as sodium amide: NaNH2.
  2. Organic amides are compounds that include the CONH2 radical. The carbon here is double-bonded to the oxygen (as in an aldehyde) and single-bonded to the amino group (NH2), so the radical bonds via the remaining bond to the carbon.

In principle, an amide might be regarded as a special kind of amine (a compound with the structure R3N) in which two of the organic groups happen to be hydrogens. In practice, of course, the point of having terms with overlapping and even nested semantic ranges is so that important special cases can be distinguished. In other words, don't call it an amine if it happens to be an amide.

The first organic compound to be synthesized from inorganic chemicals was urea, the diamide CO(NH2)2.

The most important amide is the polyamide we call protein -- amino-acid polymer.

AMII
Agile Manufacturing Information Infrastructure.

AMIL
Advanced Microscopy and Imaging Laboratory. Sponsors a Microscopy and maize website.

amine
An amine is an organic chemical homologous with ammonia: a nitrogen bonded to three organic groups. That is, a chemical which can be represented by the formula

R3N

where N is nitrogen and R3 represents three organic groups that may be identical or not. Specifically, each R is a hydrogen or an organic radical single-bonded to the nitrogen through a carbon. (In the special case that all the organic groups are hydrogen, this is the formula for ammonia. A more careful definition excludes the special cases of ammonia and amides, q.v.

Note carefully the difference between an amine and the less common azide. An azide has three nitrogens bonded to one organic group (RN3); an amine has three organic groups bonded to one nitrogen. See also imine and imide.

-amine
Simple amines tend to have names ending in the suffix -amine, and some more complex compounds have names constructed from these, in which -amine- or -amin- appears as an infix. More complex amines tend to use an amino- prefix.

Small amines are typically described as smelling like rotten fish. Cf. ammonia.

amine group
The radical --NH2 that occurs in organic amides and in some amines. More commonly called amino group.

amino-
A prefix indicating the presence of an amine structure. See entry for semantically similar -amine for usage.

amino acid
An organic acid with an amine group, with the structure
         H   H
          \ /
           N
           | 
        R--C--H
           |
           C==O
          /
        HO
The carboxyl group -COOH, shown at the bottom of the ASCII graphic above, is the usual organic acid group. It is bonded to the same carbon as the amino group (-NH2) at the top.

Note that, except in the case of glycine, where R is H, the molecule has two stereoisomers and is optically active.

The amino group of one amino acid can react with the carboxyl group of another to form a peptide bond. With the loss of one water molecule, one has the dimer (and dipeptide)

         H   H
          \ /
           N
           | 
        H--C--R
           |
       H   C==O
        \ /
         N
         | 
      H--C--R'
         |
         C==O
        /
      HO
By the obvious continuation of this process (condensation polymerization), one produces long chains of amino acids. These polymers are what we call protein. Small proteins, with ten to a hundred units, or roughly equivalently, with molecular weight between 1000 and 104, are called polypeptides.

amino group
The radical --NH2 that occurs in organic amides and in some amines. Less commonly called amine group.

AMIP
Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project. ``[A] preliminary contribution to model diagnosis and intercomparison under standardized conditions.'' Coordinated by the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI). Since 1995 there has been a corresponding project for coupled ocean-atmosphere models, CMIP.

AMIP I
Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project, phase I. Largely complete as of mid-1997. Phase II begun.

AMIP II
Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project, phase II.

AMIS
African Union Mission In Sudan. A force of 7000, to be merged into UNAMID during 2007. AUMIS is a less common (by a factor of six, judging from ghits) acronym for the force; AMIS is apparently the official acronym. And AUMIS probably sounds too much like ``oh me'' in French. Amis is French for `friends,' and it sounds a bit too soft. AMIS was deployed in 2004 and has been widely regarded as ineffective. Given the size of the armies it faces, over a region the size of France, that's no surprise.

It's too late for the current cycle of intervention, but for the next time they should consider ``African (Union) Mission In the DarfurS of Sudan'' (AMISS) or ``African (Union) Mission In South Darfur, Sudan'' (AMISS), whichever seems more appropriate. [The Darfurs are West Darfur, South Darfur, and North Darfur; their state capitals are El Geneina, Nyala, and El Fasher. The el is typical local (in Egypt and I guess here as well) pronunciation of the Arabic definite article normally written al. By an official estimate for 2000, South Darfur had a population of 2.7 million, making it the most populous state (or wilayat) of Sudan. There were an estimated 1.4 and 1.5 million in North and West Darfur. West Darfur is the primary region of the ``Darfur Conflict'' that began in 2003, and as of October 2006, there were an estimated 200,000 to 450,000 dead and 2.5 million displaced.]

AMIS
American Musical Instrument Society. It is an ``international organization founded in 1971 to promote better understanding of all aspects of the history, design, construction, restoration, and usage of musical instruments in all cultures and from all periods.''

That sounds pretty inclusive. In my culture and my period, air guitar is a major instrument. I think it operates by simulated emission or something. Tuning these buggers is a snap -- just like an oboe.

AMK
Adam (Smith) Met Karl (Marx). A Hong Kong rock group (1989-1996).

amk
alt.movies.kubrick. A newsgroup your site may have.

AMK
Avaimet Menestykseen Kajaanista. A polytechnic institute in Northern Finland. Claims to be the best in its region. (Explanation in Finnish.) Could be by default.

AML
ACPI Machine Language. Pseudocode for a virtual machine supported by an ACPI-compatible OS and in which ACPI control methods and objects are written. Cf. ASL.

[Phone icon]

AML
Actual Measured Loss (in telephone line). If it differs from expectation (EML) by a half a dB or so it needs eventual attention. IBM has a trademark on ``AML2,'' but I don't know what that is. They have other trademarks, some of which make you wonder if anything is sacred anymore.

Oh Noooo! The sacrilege continues: a search engine called G. O. D. And we all know how careless the English are with punctuation.

AML
AngioMyoLipoma.

AML
Anti-Money Laundering. So far as I know, the use of parentheses within compound nouns of (at least somewhat) natural language is common only in chemistry. It's a useful practice, though it may seem ugly to the unaccustomed eye. The head term of this entry can be expanded (and bracketed) as anti-(money laundering). Of course, if this were a chemical term it would probably be antimony laundering.

AML
ARC Macro Language.

AMLCD
Active Matrix Liquid Crystal Display.

AmLit
AMerican LITerature. Writing this as Am Lit or Am-Lit might seem to suggest that you are on fire or high, so don't write it that way. Most people don't.

Oh great: with sensitivity to ``diversity,'' the politically correct form is plural: ``American Literatures.'' You see, we are just now emerging from a dark ages in which American literature was thought to be one homogeneous unity.

Probably on account of the other side being spotted a few centuries' head start, there still seems to be more Brit Lit than AmLit. Not too many years ago -- maybe in an issue of Lingua Franca in the mid-nineties, I read an article about what American universities were doing to address this problem. They were making attractive offers for permanent storage of the personal papers of dead white European males (DWEM).

It could be much worse. My mother got her high school education (delayed by her years as a refugee, and compressed as she tried to make up a few years of that) in Argentina. Argentina has some excellent literature to be proud of, but there isn't all that much of it (I mean of the good stuff). Consequently, the patriotic effort to expose Argentine students to Argentine literature tends to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Apparently this isn't a problem in the US because we no longer require high school students to read any literature (or anything else that isn't going to be on the test).

AMLO
Andrés Manuel López Obrador. A former mayor of Mexico City (México, D.F.), candidate of the PRD in the July 2006 presidential elections. In March he was polling 38-39%, against 31% for Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (PAN) and 28-29% for Roberto Madrazo Pintado (PRI). (Numbers don't sum to 100% not only because of rounding but because there were a couple of minor-party candidates: Patricia Mercado and Roberto Campa). By the end of June, to judge from polls, AMLO had fallen behind and then come back. The last polls released before a June 23 black-out date (no poll data are allowed to be published in the last eight days before the election) showed AMLO with 36.5% to 32.2% for Calderón. Handicappers were claiming that the race hung on turn-out.

Madrazo, candidate of the once-strong but now-divided PRI, polled third at 27%. He was once governor of the state of Tabasco, but his candidacy did not catch fire. (You have to forgive me, because I had to make some pun.)

Felipe Calderón won the actual election, if the apparatus overseeing the election is to be believed. Most observers probably believe, but AMLO thinks that the election was stolen from him. He held a few protests, and as of late 2008 he's still of the same opinion.

AMM
Australian Meteorological Magazine. A quarterly published by the Australian Government Publishing Service for the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The rain falls down there too.

AMMA
Acrylonitrile Methyl MethAcrylate copolymer. A plastic.

AM/MA
Ancient Medicine / Medicina Antiqua. A useful history-of-medicine website, maintained by and with materials collected mostly by Lee Pearcy. It moved in 2004 and is called just Medicina Antiqua. See MEDANT.

Amman
The capital of modern Jordan. The Biblical city of Rabbah (capital of Ammon -- you remember the Ammonites!). The name is from a common Semitic root with meanings related to `great.' (In Modern Hebrew, todah rabah is the common expression meaning `thank you very much.') It was at the siege of Rabbah by Joab that the infamous killing of Uriah the Hittite took place, described in I Samuel 11. Rabbah was ``destroyed'' and rebuilt a number of times. In the middle of the third century BCE it was rebuilt and renamed Philadelphia by Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The later Roman rebuilding was so extensive that few of the currently surviving artifacts or ruins are pre-Roman.

AMMI
American Museum of the Moving Image. 35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, New York City.

ammonal
AMMONium nitrate and ALuminum powder. An explosive mix.

ammonia
In strict chemical usage, ammonia is the chemical NH3. Loosely, and in common parlance, ``ammonia'' is an aqueous solution of ammonia.

When crabs have started to go bad, there's a hint of ammonia smell. (Buy crabs when they smell sweet and fresh, and feel dense -- i.e., heavy for their size.) Cf. amides.

ammoniated
Cheese and other milk products are called ammoniated when they spoil in such a way as to give off ammonia. For what it's worth, small amines are almost universally described as smelling like rotting fish.

AMMRL
Association of Managers in Magnetic Resonance Laboratories. Their mail archives are available back to 1993. See also NMR entry.

Amnas
A town in Finland and Romania, give or take a diacritical mark or two.

AMNH
American Museum of Natural History. In New York City. The thing that struck me most about the place, when I visited as a kid, was that you could walk directly into it from the subway, without going outside.

amnio
AMNIOcentesis. Extraction for analysis of a small sample of fetal cells from the amniotic fluid. Amniocentesis cannot be performed before the fifteenth week of pregnancy. Typically, it is done between the fifteenth and eighteenth weeks, and an additional two to four weeks are required for cell culturing and analysis, so the fetus is typically well into the second trimester by the time results are available. There are two other, standard but less common methods of prenatal genetic testing, both with higher risk of miscarriage: CVS and PUBS.

AMO
Air Mass, uh, Ought. There's a tendency to avoid expanding this directly and instead explain it as ``Solar Spectrum Outer space.'' In other words, air mass zero. This is unexpected, as extrapolating from the definitions of AM2 and AM1 leads to an AM0 (with zero) precisely identical with AMO (with the letter O). Perhaps they were trying to be ``bright,'' but this wasn't even clever. I don't know the history; possibly AMO was back-formed from the spoken form ``ay em oh'' of an original AM0.

amo
`I love' in Latin and in various Romance languages such as Spanish and Italian. (Portuguese is less pro-drop, so it is eu amo that is translated as `I love.')

In Spanish, amo is also a noun meaning `owner.' I'll have to poke into the etymology of that.

AMO processes
Atomic, Molecular, and Optical PROCESSES.

AMP
Adenosine MonoPhosphate.

AMP
Alliance for Minority Participation. No, no, it's not about corporate mergers and acquisitions. That's what I thought too.

amp
Jargon for both AMPere[s] and AMPlifier. A tad inconvenient, since both are electrical terms, but confusion is rare. If you want confusion, see the C/R entry.

AMP
Association for Molecular Pathology.

AMPAL
The Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient Literature. One of the largest postgraduate [i.e., ``graduate-student'' in US usage] conferences in ancient literature in the UK.

AMPAS
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It's not clear to me which part is science, precisely, or art. This is the name of the scholarly organization that awards the ``Oscar'' certification.

Even an Academy Award nomination is considered an honor, and is considered a valuable marketing boost. The reality-show entry has some anecdotal information on the considerations that go into the awarding of an award nomination.

The Academy Awards are announced and presented at an annual event held on a Sunday at the end of February or the beginning of March. I think this is the event that they like to have hosted by a comedian, and none of them wants to do it. Maybe they should try to get a politician instead -- some of those guys are naturals, and there's the bonus that they have no scruples. But maybe it was some other awards event. Some other film awards (specially selected because they're awarded by organizations with acronym names): ACEC, BAFTA, BFCA, CFCA.

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amphorae
Here's a site with a big one, as well as some speculations about parties in the Greek Polis. In this connection, it may be well to recall the words of Shaquille O'Neal, as recorded in the January 1995 Esquire, p. 41, as among the ``Dubious Achievements'' of 1994. Then again, perhaps it would be better not to recall those words. Oh well, maybe. Still, I don't know. Aw, what the heck [ftnt. 10]:
When asked whether he had visited the Parthenon during a trip to Greece, Shaquille O'Neal said, `I can't really remember the names of the clubs that we went to.'

Although this datum is insufficient basis for making a definitive determination of intelligence, it is nevertheless interesting to know what the Shaq's own attitudes on intelligence are. He made some of these attitudes clear in January 1998. According to a report in the Saturday, Jan. 10, 1998 Sports section of the South Bend Tribune (probably not an exclusive, but there I read it), the Laker center criticized teammate Mario Bennett for not having his passport for the previous Wednesday's road trip to Vancouver. Shaq was quoted as saying

``He's an idiot, an idiot: I - D - I - U - T.''

Shaq has done some rap recordings, including ``You Can't Stop The Reign'' and ``Strait Playin'.''

The word for pail or bucket in German is Eimer. English had an archaic cognate of this word in ember. The ultimate etymology of these words is obscure, but one hypothesis is that they are related to the Greek word amphora.

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ampersand
The name of the character &, which is a ligature of e and t -- et: Latin for and. In fact, some fonts have an ampersand in which the bottom of the symbol runs horizontally for a short distance and then curls up to the vertical, so it looks very much like ``Et.''

Latin was used in Roman Britain, a Celtic region that for over four centuries was part of the Roman Empire. As the empire declined, however, so did the Roman presence in Britain. Whatever Latin was spoken in England was substantially extinguished, along with the Celtic culture, in fifth-century invasions and conquests by West Germanic tribes (mostly Angles, Saxons, and Jutes). The West Germanic languages had many loan words from Latin, particularly for trade items and saliently foreign features of Roman culture (church- and war-related terminology). There's no evidence of et being adopted, and no reason to expect it to be. Latin was reintroduced with the mission of Augustine of Canterbury, begun in 596. For an and symbol used in the Anglo-Saxon period, see this 7 entry.

The usual explanation for the name of this character begins that when children recited the alphabet, they used to go from A through Z and finish with the character &. Since the symbol is normally read as ``and,'' it was necessary to put some kind of verbal quotation marks around it, to indicate that it was being recited as a list item, and not as a conjunction. (``Zed and and'' sounds like a stutter and leaves you expecting more.) Today we might say that it was necessary to indicate that ``&'' was to be parsed as a string or character literal and not as an operator. This was long before people started raising their arms and flexing their index and middle fingers while saying quote, quote, unquote. Too bad, I'd have liked to have seen it. Instead, they used the Latin phrase per se in the sense of `as itself':

``... ex, wye, zed and -- per se and.''
Eventually, ``and per se and'' became ampersand.

Cf. posthaste.

Y'know, Alexis Saint-Léger Léger used the pen name St.-John Perse. Somebody ought to look into this.

A similar situation explains the names of the Greek letters epsilon and upsilon. Originally, the letters were called by their sounds. (E.g., ``tò u'' -- `the u' -- for upsilon. As the sounds of Greek evolved, it happened that ai and oi came to have the same sounds as e and u respectively. Reflecting this fact, expressions like ``tò u psilón'' and ``tò psilòn u'' came to be used to indicate the single-letter ways of writing the sounds. The two expressions given literally mean `the bare u.' I think `the plain u' might express the sense better.

AMPHL
The Association of Medical Professionals with Hearing Losses.

You say you're ``beading profusely''? Oh! Breeding profusely! Don't worry -- people used to have lots of kids; it won't kill you.

amplified bible
And the Lord said, ``Let there be thousand-watt speakers!''

AMPO
Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO's).

[Phone icon]

AMPS
Advanced Mobile Phone {Service|System}. Like times that are modern, the mobile phone service that is advanced is precisely the kind we already suffer from. Analog mobile phone system instituted in the US in 1984, supplemented later with a digital standard (D-AMPS).

Still a popular cellular system in North America. Uses FDMA. Required by FCC to detect signals at -116 dBm in a 30 kHz band (825-844 MHz and 870-899 MHz), and to achieve a signal-to-(noise plus distortion) ratio of 12 dB at that power. The definitive standard for AMPS voice services is specified by TIA IS-53, entitled ``Cellular Features Description.'' Implementation mechanisms for those services are specified by TIA IS-41 (``Cellular Radio Telecommunications Intersystem Operations'').

(AT&T, the ol' Ma Bell, proposed the concept of mobile cellular to the FCC in 1968, a couple of years before it was possible to demonstrate the possibility of implementation. The FCC allocated spectrum for AMPS in 1983.)

GSM (q.v.) has about twice the capacity.

AMPTP
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

AMR
L'Alliance Maladies Rares.

AMR
Anisotropic MagnetoResistance.

AMRA
American Medical Record Association. Once the name of an organization founded as the Association of Record Librarians of North America (ARLNA, q.v.).

AMRAAM
Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile.

AMRC
Association of Medical Research Charities. It's ``a membership organisation of the leading UK charities that fund medical and health research. It was founded in 1972 and established as a charity in 1987.''

A&M Records
A record company founded by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. They originally went into partnership as Carnival Records. Their first release, in early 1962, was quickly bought by Dot Records, which reissued under its own label. Before Alpert and Moss could release their second record, in August 1962, they discovered that another Carnival Records was already in existence. That's when they chose the name ``A & M Records'' (yes, the A and M represent the initials of their surnames). So people typically say that it was founded in 1962, but I think it was founded in 1961 and got the name by which it is known in 1962.

In 1989 they sold the label to PolyGram for about a half a billion dollars. (Alpert and Moss took management positions at PolyGram but left in 1993. When you're worth a quarter billion bucks or so, you can afford to retire at 58.) In 1998 PolyGram was absorbed by Universal Music Group, and in early 1999 Seagram's, which owned Universal, gutted A&M. The A&M label then continued as just a label for its backlist. (A good page of information up to that point is part of an online ``A&M & Related Labels Album Discography.'')

In 2000 Vivendi bought Seagram's, mostly for its media holdings. (They sold off the flagship liquor division for needed cash.) Vivendi was a French water utility that tried, under CEO Jean-Marie Messier, to become a global media power. They didn't make it. On October 8, 2003, they reached agreement with GE to sell Vivendi Universal Entertainment, which will become part of NBC (to be renamed NBC Universal). The merger is pending European and US regulatory approval, hoped for in 2Q 2004.

Jerry Moss was mainly a professional record promoter when he and Alpert teamed up. Herb Alpert you remember from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, right? Also known more appropriately, and sometimes credited, as ``Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass.'' Initially, there was not a Tijuana Brass distinct from Herb Alpert. Herb and Jerry Moss took a break in recording to see a bullfight in Tijuana, and there heard a mariachi band. To produce a similar effect, they overdubbed Herb Alpert's trumpet. (Also, the engineer added bullfight crowd roars from a sound-effects record.) Alpert eventually put together a Tijuana Brass band for touring and broadcast performances. They were pretty MOR -- old people's music. So were other acts that A&M signed until about 1966.

It's not really relevant, but did you ever notice how a lot of English speakers, even in (upper) California, pronounce Tijuana with an extra shwa after the first i?

AMS
Accelerator Mass Spectromet{er|ry}.

AMS
Access Method Services. Also IDCAMS, q.v.

AMS
Acute Mountain Sickness. Hey -- Socrates probably wasn't the first to say it, but if you've seen one, you've seen'em all. (In fact, it seems to be attributed to Socrates only in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. i, sec. ii, mem. 4, subs. 7, so it's well likely he didn't say it. But you can't prove he didn't, so let's go with that.)

AMS
Aerosol Mass Spectromet{er|ry}.

AMS
American Management Systems, Inc.

AMS
American Mathematical Society. There exists at least one homepage.

AMS
American Meteorological Society. They seem to piggyback their homepage directly on NSF.

AMS
American Microscopical Society, Inc. Organized 1878, which was pretty early for these parts, and incorporated in 1891, it's now ``an international society of biologists organized to encourage the use of microscopy. Its members are mostly scientists and educators who use various kinds of microscopes in their research and teaching--light and electron microscopes, fluorescence and confocal microscopes, and other tools for visualizing the small. It publishes reports of research on invertebrate biology (in its journal Invertebrate Biology), conducts annual meetings on research using microscopy, and organizes workshops on techniques of microscopy and on biology of organisms studied by microscopy.''

AMS
American Montessori Society.

AMS
American Musicological Society. It ``was founded in 1934 to advance research in the various fields of music as a branch of learning and scholarship. [As of 2007,] 3,600 individuals and 1,200 institutional subscribers from over forty nations participate in the Society.'' It's been a constituent society of the ACLS since 1951. ACLS has an overview.

Cf. Society for American Music (SAM) and Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM).

AMS
Atomic Mass Spectro{met{ry|er}|scop{e|y}}.

AMS
Australian Mathematical Society. There exists another homepage downunder.

AMSA
American Medical Student Association.

AMSA
Australian Medical Students Association.

AMSANZ
Aviation Medical Society of Australia and New Zealand.

AMSN
Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses. Based in Pitman, New Jersey.

AMSP
Appalachian Mathematics and Science Partnership. A project of ARSI.

AmSpec
The AMerican SPECtator. See TAS.

AMSRS
Australian Market & Social Research Society. (Formerly the MRSA.)

AMT
Alternative Minimum Tax. A term used by the US IRS and the Canadian CRA. If you need help preparing your tax return, try visiting the IRS website. Do not pass Go! Do not collect $200.

amt.
AMounT.

AMT
Automated Manufacturing Technology.

AMTEC
Alkali-Metal {Thermal-to-Electric|ThermoElectric} Conversion. The alkali metal usually being sodium or potassium (Na-AMTEC and K-AMTEC).

AMU
Alarm Maintenance Unit. Not Chicken Little.

AMU
Aligarh Muslim University. In India.

AMU
Applied Meteorology Unit. An effort to transfer new techniques from research to application in weather forecasting and analysis in support of the Space Shuttle and the National Space Program.

AMU, amu
Arab Maghreb Union. Vide UMA.

AMU, amu
Atomic Mass Unit. In units convenient to an elementary-particle physicist, it is 931.5 MeV/c2. Since 1961 it has been defined as one twelfth of the mass of a 12C atom. Abbreviated u (q.v. for more accurate value and link). Also called a dalton.

Before 1961, the amu was based inconsistently on the mass of Oxygen (O). Physicists used an amu that was 1/16 the mass of an 16O, chemists used 1/16 the average mass of naturally occurring oxygen atoms, a mix mostly of 16O with small admixture of 17O and 18O.

The definition agreed to in 1961 was a compromise that had the precision of the physical definition (independent of the slightly variable naturally observed isotope mix of O) but a numerical value closer to the earlier chemical definition. Up to measurement error:

1 amu (international) = 1.000318 amu (physical) = 1.000043 amu (chemical)

Sometimes the physical and chemical definitions and values of these units were distinguished as pmu (physical mass unit) and cmu (chemical mass unit).

An amu is approximately the mass of a proton. It's a little less because nuclear binding energy is a few MeV per nucleon, and that is the main difference between the mass of an atom and the mass of its constituents. The difference in mass between the heavier neutron and lighter proton is just 1.3 MeV/c2, the mass of an electron is about negligible (1/1837 of a proton mass, or 0.000549 u), and the mass equivalent of the electronic binding energies is at least a couple of orders of magnitude down from that except for the largest atoms (just let me know when you plan to fully ionize a uranium atom).

AMVETS
American Veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. National Homepage has the <BLINK> disease. Congressionally chartered. ``[M]embership in AMVETS is open to anyone who is currently serving, or who has honorably served, in the Armed Forces of the United States--to include National Guard and Reserve components--at anytime after Sept. 15, 1940.''

AMWA
Advanced Media Workflow Association. ``Putting AAF and MXF to work.'' This is the same old organization you knew (or more likely didn't know) as the AAF Association (AAFA). ``The AAF Association Board of Directors voted for the new name on February 23, 2007, to better reflect the association's mission, direction and focus on file-based workflows including AAF, MXF and other formats.''

AMWA
American Medical Women's Association.

AMWA
American Medical Writers Association. Founded 1940.

AMWA
Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies.

AMWA
Australasian Medical Writers Association.

AMWU
Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union. (If that link fails, check the one in the asn.org subdomain.)

AM0
Vide AM-Oh.

AM1
Air Mass 1. Solar spectrum at earth's surface for optimum conditions at sea level, sun at zenith.

AM2
Air Mass 2. Normally described as the ``solar spectrum at earth's surface for average weather conditions.'' Technically, it's the theoretical solar spectrum that results when an AMO spectrum is attenuated by two path traversals through the atmosphere.

An
ActiNide. Or actinoid, if you want to be hip with the IUPAC hepcats. Anyway, An is an informal chemical symbol for a generic actinide. Don't confuse it with Ac, the symbol for actinium. There's a similar symbol Ln, for a generic lanthanide.

A/N
AlphaNumeric.

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AN
Ancient Narrative.
``Ancient Narrative (AN) is first and foremost an electronic journal, in which selected articles will be discussed during a period of several months, before they will be revised by the authors and appear in a printed volume.

Issues of the electronic journal AN will appear on the Internet three times a year. Moreover, a printed version containing revised versions of articles which have been discussed in the electronic version of AN will appear in a printed volume to be published once a year.

Special, theme-oriented issues of the electronic journal, as well as of the annual printed volume of AN will be planned. Your suggestions for such issues are very welcome.

AN is the electronic continuation of the Petronian Society Newsletter (ed. Gareth Schmeling) and the Groningen Colloquia on the Novel (eds. Heinz Hofmann and Maaike Zimmerman). Therefore, AN will, besides full articles, publish bibliographical information as well as brief notes on relevant subjects. The editors will also invite specialists for reviews, which will be published in the electronic journal and in the annual printed volume of AN.''

Articles and reviews mostly in English. French and Italian articles have appeared as well.

An
ANorthite. A chemical compound (calcium aluminosilicate: CaAl2Si2O8) and a mineral. The mineral anorthite is a solid solution of the chemicals anorthite and albite (sodium aluminosilicate, abbreviated Ab) with no more than 10% albite. The solid solutions of An and Ab in any proportion are collectively classed as the mineral plagioclase feldspar, and pure An and Ab are called the endmembers of the ``mineral series.''

.an
(Domain name code for) Netherlands Antilles. Here's the government website. We mention the Netherlands Antilles at the CBS entry.

ANA
Acoustic Neuroma Association.

ANA
All Nippon Air. Mostly domestic Japanese carrier.

ANA
American Neurological Association.

ANA
American Nurses Association. (Alternate URL: <http://www.ana.org/>.) The ANA was founded in 1896 as the Nurses Associated Alumnae. [There was a time, you know, when a registered nurse could be expected to know that alumna is a first-declension noun, and alumnae its nominative (and vocative and locative) plural, as also its genitive (and dative) singular. Well, you can expect a lot of things. But seriously, I've seen a bound typescript, from as late as the 1960's, of a course in Latin for nurses.] Anyway, this organization participated in the formation of the ICN in 1899. The current name was adopted in 1911.

ANA
AntiNuclear Antibody. Not effective against atomic bombs.

ANA
A Novel Approach to writing. ``ANA is proud to be the only Independent, free writing site that has formulated a Charter to protect its members.'' Gee.

The ``Novel'' in the name is a pun; it's an organization for authors of poetry and fiction.

ANA
Athens News Agency. An EANA member.

ANA
Automatic Network Analyzer. ``Automatic'' in the same sense that a modern hand-held electronic calculator (or a calculator ap on a smartphone) automatically, like, calculates. So the main reason for including the word ``automatic'' in the term is that it yields a somewhat longer and more distinctive acronym. ``NA'' already means ``numerical aperture'' to too many of the same people, and to too many other people in electrical engineering. An ANA is the basic tool of modern microwave measurement. An ANA simultaneously measures the magnitudes and phases of network parameters (b/k/a S-parameters).

ANAA
American Nursing Assistants Association. Possibly this is not a very active organization. It has a post office box in Ottawa (Ottawa, Kansas). I think that nursing assistant and nursing aide are modern terms for orderly. Like many jobs that are thankless and necessary, it's poorly paid. The ANAA also represents or whatever people who work as home health aides. (What they need is a union.)

ANAC
Aboriginal Nurses Association of Canada.

ANA\C
American Nurses Association\California. I never knew the backslash was part of English orthography. (I mean, APL\360 hardly counts as English -- it's a loan from Geek.) Maybe the ANA should have a look at this and see if they can make it better.

ANAC
Associated New American Colleges. Founded in 1995, it's ``a national consortium of twenty-one selective small to mid-size independent colleges and universities (2,000-7,500 students) dedicated to the purposeful integration of liberal education, professional studies, and civic engagement.''

ANAC
Association of Nurses in AIDS Care.

anacoluthon
An ungrammatical change of construction in a sentence. Not the most elegant figure of speech.

Off-hand, I can't think of a good -- I'm working on it, don't rush me! I suppose a dangling participle -- do you think that might be an example of a weak sort of anacoluthon? But I was talking to Gary earlier this month when I was really sick, and at one point I said ``when my grammar goes to hell like that, I'm really sick.'' And he said that when he'd heard me speak the previous sentence, he'd thought ``no, I didn't hear that.'' (Friends are like that -- they'll forgive a grammatical crime, even forget it, as if it were no big deal.) It's always great when we coauthor papers, because we're on the same linguistic wavelength -- reading from the same page, so to speak, and literally too. Of course, not a lot of great literature is joint-authored, but then there's Lennon and McCartney.

The idea of anacoluthon reminds me that they used changes of key very effectively. You'd be humming along for eight or ten bars in one key (G seemed like their favorite) and then suddenly a few scattered notes would signal a shift, and the whole mood changed. The clearest example I can think of is in ``Here, There and Everywhere.'' The first seven bars are in the key of C (last note A). The next three notes are D, but followed by an E flat in the ninth bar. That's want in ``I want her ev'ry...,'' which is a scale from D to A flat in the E-flat key. It's strikingly subdued, to coin a phrase, and I think you can sense something changed if you have even the slightest acculturation to Western scales. The way they play the natural rhythm of the sentences against the natural beat of the measures is also artful. But the bottom line with the Beatles is nescience. The music is too simple, almost too ordinary to sound as good as it does. Analysis is futile. Especially by me.

ANACS
American Numismatic Association Certification Service.

anagram
A reordering of the letters of a word or phrase. The rearrangement may involve removing or inserting spaces, not to mention punctuation. I suppose you could say that ``tjlbh'' is an anagram of ``jb... h tl,'' but in the more interesting cases, the original arrangement of letters is of an intelligible word or phrase. In the most interesting cases, it is usually also possible to make some sense of the anagram as well, but that isn't necessary. Famous instances of the exceptional case are anagrams created by Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke, whose anagrams encoded Latin encapsulations of discoveries (or inventions) they had made.

The serious purpose of these anagrams was to assure proper credit for priority without immediately revealing the discoveries. On the other hand, some people just did it because it was popular and they thought it was fun. (E.g., Huygens included an anagram along with the letter describing his spring-based watch.) Pity the seventeenth century: no television. What Franklin used to do, when he was an active ``electrician'' in the 1750's, was send a letter to be read to the Royal Society, but ask the secretary not to read it (to the society) just yet. (Of course, this option was sometimes unavailable. Hooke was Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society from shortly after its founding. He was Secretary of the Royal Society from 1677 to 1683, though by then his scientific work was done. Newton became President of the Royal Society in 1705, when his great scientific work was done also, but the position did avail him in the vicious fights over credit for past scientific discoveries.)

One of the great priority controversies of that era was Hooke's claim that he had devised a spring-driven watch five years before Huygens. It was difficult to check Hooke's claims, because the notes of the Royal Society from 1661 to 1682 were missing. They were found again, apparently supporting Hooke's claim, in 2006.

For ordinary anagrams, check out the highly useful Internet Anagram Server.

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ANAHITA
The mailing list associated with Diotima, although you needn't be a member of either one to join the other. The current short description may suggest the diversity of people interested:
ANAHITA-L is a scholarly list for the discussion of women and gender in the ancient Mediterranean world. Not a religious list!

From April 1996 to March 2000, ANAHITA ran on LISTSERV software and was served by the University of Kentucky, with Ross Scaife serving as owner. The archives from that period are still available there.

In March 2002, David Meadows and Sally Winchester became co-owners and moved it to onelist.com, which was absorbed by Yahoo! Groups. The current list homepage is there. Here's the current description:

ANAHITA-L is a scholarly list for the discussion of women and gender in the ancient Mediterranean world. Discussion topics include: women's work, legal status, social roles -- both public and private, intellectual life, religious activities, and men's views on women. The discussions should be based upon historical, archaeological, linguistic, literary and other evidence from the ancient world and the various interpretations of this evidence. There are many interpretations of the source material and we encourage a variety of approaches, including controversial authors such as Stone and Gimbutas. These latter authors may be discussed critically but they are not to be taken as the 'final word' on any topic. Some familiarity with original source material is expected.

This list does not encompass personal religious beliefs. It is not a list on which to reveal your personal encounters with deities or to proselytize for your religion.

See our general entry on mailing lists.

Analog Devices
They used to have a suspicious, downright surly web presence, and it was just a boring gopher site. Now they have Web page that is friendly and perky. This is not an isolated phenomenon; it is a characteristic of free markets.

anamnesis
A noun for the ability to recall or remember, or for the act of doing so. What did I just say? Anamnesis is also used in medicine for case history or medical record.

Anamnesis
The title of two books by Eric Voegelin. The first book, written in German and published in 1966, is longer and therefore in virtually every respect worse. (Its full title is Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik -- `Anamnesis: Toward the Theory of History and Politics.') The second (full title: Anamnesis), published in almost idiomatic English in 1978, contains some of the chapters from the first book, translated by Gerhart Niemeyer, some material published later and elsewhere, and a new introductory chapter.

The tone and utility of the book may be accurately gauged from the first lines of that new chapter:

In 1943 I had arrived at a dead-end in my attempts to find a theory of man, society, and history that would permit an adequate interpretation of the phenomena in my chosen field of studies.

Oh, chapter three is good, it's a bunch of generally boring recollections of his ordinary childhood.

More of the same may be found at the self-regarding entry.

ANAMUX
ANAlog MUltipleXer.

ANAO
Australian National Audit Office.

anastomosis
Surgical joining of two organs (such as muscles, nerves, or blood vessels). Too bad, it would have made a fantastic name for this figureof speech. (No, not the next one. That would be figure speech of.)

anastrophe
A figure of speech: the preposition following its object. This occurs in Latin (quos inter) and in Greek.

In Latin and Greek, prepositions are normally in the ``pre'' position: they normally precede their object. German has a couple of common prepositions that function as postpositions also, like nach (see m.A.n.). That wouldn't qualify as a figure of speech.

Anat.
ANATomy. Hey! This is a family glossary!

A.N.A.T.
A New Approach to Taxation. A transportation tax structure introduced in Australia in 1998, intended to establish competitive neutrality between road and rail. A.N.A.T. stands for the new name of the new tax. The old name had the unattractive acronym ANTS.

anatomically correct
With the naughty parts included (on a doll; not necessarily a children's doll).

anatomically incorrect
  1. With some naughty part or parts missing, such as the balls.
  2. With an enlarged gall bladder where the heart should be. (This is a terrible affliction to those not directly affected.)
  3. With the head up the ass.
  4. Politically correct.

ANC
Académie Nationale de Chirurgie. The French `National Academy of Surgery.' I guess if you do that for a living, the homepage might not seem grotesque.

ANC
Access Network Controller.

ANC
African National Congress. Founded 1912. South African political organization. It is a partner in the Tripartite Alliance (national parliamentary coalition) with the SACP and the COSATU, but the ANC alone holds 70% of the seats in the South African Parliament as of 2008.

ANCA
  1. Australian National Coastal Authority,
  2. Australian National Council on AIDS,
  3. Australian Nature Conservation Agency.

Paul? You're thinking of Paul Anka.

ANCC
American Nurses Credentialing Center. The ANCC says it is ``the world's largest and most prestigious nurse credentialing organization, and a subsidiary of the American Nurses Association'' (ANA).

ANCJ
Aramaic New Covenant. I guess the J is for Herb Jahn, who offered up this sacrifice, worth a mere sixteen of his years, in 1996. The texts of the New Testament began to be canonized (and conversely some other Christian scriptures to be proscribed) by Marcion and others, after some of them had been in circulation more than a century. Jahn believes that the originals were written in Aramaic, and he tried to reconstruct what the original Aramiac words were and then to translate them into English. The idioms are translated literally. Something for the adventurous soul.

ANCOVA
ANAlysis of COVAriance.

ANCW
American National CattleWomen. ``[F]ounded in 1952 as the American National CowBelles, to give women a voice in the beef cattle industry. The name was changed in 1984 to reflect the changing times.'' But what does the name mean? Membership restricted to US citizens? Cattlewomen of the American nation as opposed to the American continent? National cattlewomen from America? National women, American cattle?

``... has more than 5500 members and speaks for more than 25,000 CattleWomen from coast to coast.'' I am the only one who sees a problem with this reasoning?

``ANCW is the sponsor and project leader of the National Beef Cook-Off®, in cooperation with the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA) and the Cattlemen's Beef Board (CBB).''

And
Andromedae. (Genitive form of Andromeda.) Official IAU abbreviation used for naming astronomical objects in the region assigned to the constellation Andromeda. For example, the brightest star in that region of sky is abbreviated α And, which is normally read out loud as ``alpha Andromedae.''

Andromeda is a name from mythology, the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia. ``Andromeda'' is sometimes given the ``translation'' of ``princess of Ethiopia'' or ``chained lady.''

AND
Association for the Neurologically Disabled of Canada. French: Association Canadienne pour les Handicapes Neurologiques.

ANDA
Abbreviated New Drug Application to the FDA.

ANDA
Auxiliary to the National Dental Association. It ``has been for many years as a support group for the spouses of dental professionals. Membership is open to all spouses regardless of sex. ANDA also raises scholarship funds and awards yearly scholarship(s) to deserving dental students.''

anda
Third-person singular present-tense form of andar. Also the familiar (tu) imperative form.

ANDAR
Association Nationale de Défense contre l'Arthrite Rhumatoïde.

andar
Spanish, `to go.' There is another verb, ir, that also translates `to go.' One could say that andar is more about the process, and ir is more about the destination. If you want to discuss the scenery that you saw as you were going along (not necessarily to any specified destination), you want to use andar.

If you want to say that a machine is on, you can say that ``la máquina esta andando.'' If you tried to construct a similar expression with the present perfect of ir instead of andar, the closest you'd get would be ``la máquina esta llendose,'' meaning `the machine is going away.'

[dive flag]

ANDI
American Nitrox Divers Inc.

ANDI
Associazione Nazionale Dentisti Italiani. `National Association [of] Italian Dentists.' (No, Italian does not have a genitive inflection. The things that look like Latin second-declension genitives are just a masculine plural noun and adjective, functioning together as an attributive noun.)

and other artists.
AND OTHER ARTISTS you never heard of.

and other hits.
And filler.

and Philosophy
And how it can be milked.

Open Court Press has... Hey, shouldn't that be ``Full Court Press''? Aw, it's Open Court Publishing Company. Anyway, this press publishes a ``Popular Culture and Philosophy'' series. It was inaugurated in 1999 with Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing, a work praised in the journal Entertainment Weekly. This achievement was followed in 2001 by The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! Of Homer. The Open Court web site quotes a positive comment on the book that was posted at <amazon.com>. (Yes, and some others.) This is either provocative or desperate. The Matrix and Philosophy (2002) became a best-seller. (It's about the movie, not the Toyota hatchback. You say there's something else called a matrix?) Buffy the Vampire Slayer aP and The Lord of the Rings aP (subtitled ``One Book to Rule Them All'') were both perpetrated in 2003. In December of that year, I heard that Bob Dylan aP was under consideration. The Sopranos and Philosophy was forthcoming.

Everybody's trying to horn in on the action. In December 2005, the University Press of Mississippi published Comics as Philosophy. I'm not even trying to keep up with the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series. Just run the search.

I'll concede that these series only exploit commercially what has long been exploited academically, but it does make the strategy transparent. And I see nothing wrong in principle with thinking deeply and hard about subjects that are shallow and soft, so long as one is ready to admit at the end that the effort was vain, as it probably will have been. Especially if the one doing it would otherwise still have been wasting time. I'm just extremely skeptical. I'm similarly skeptical of things like ``The Erotic: Exploring Critical Issues,'' unless it comes with complimentary samples. Cf. seriousness.

Andrea
I want to meet 'er.

You're probably thinking, ``no, that should be `Anita / I wanna meet-a' or `Andrea / Let's visit Alexandria.' ''

Look, I'm writing the lyrics to this glossary, okay? Just stop complaining and sing along.

(Shhh! Sometimes little elves sneak in here at night and stick entries like this into the glossary. Who is this ``Andrea,'' do you know? Is this just some cultural reference that I'm not getting?)

and stuff
AND I'm sure there's lots of other STUFF but I can't happen to think of a single one now. Expression usually follows a list containing one item. It's not considered good style to use it as the entire list, as in ``it's good for and stuff.''

A slightly interesting aspect of this usage is that stuff is grammatically uncountable.

And that's not just my opinion.
I've told other people, too.

and yes,
When this compound conjunction is followed by an admission or concession of the validity, at least in part, of an opposing argument, then it is a demonstration of the speaker's bona fides. When it is followed by the statement of a point in the speaker's favor, it is a sign of tendentious or political speech.

ANE
American Numismatic Exchange. ``Annie.'' Died 1989. Current successor is the CCE.

[column]

ANE
Ancient Near East. A mailing list devoted to the Ancient Near East. To subscribe, send an email message to <majordomo@oi.uchicago.edu> with no subject, with the single content line
subscribe ANE

anecdote
Singular of data.

(Sociologists' joke. Ha-ha.)

ANERA
American Near East Refugee Aid.

ANES
American National Election Studies. It claims to produce ``high quality data on voting, public opinion, and political participation to serve the research needs of social scientists, teachers, students, policy makers and journalists who want to better understand the theoretical and empirical foundations of national election outcomes. Central to this mission is the active involvement of the ANES research community in all phases of the project.''

[column]

ANES
Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at University Carolina in the Czech Republic.

aneurism
Understandable misspelling for aneurysm.

aneurysm
Here are some useful general information links that I found:

Once believed to be due almost exclusively to atherosclerosis. That estimate has decreased.

ANF
American Nurses Foundation.

ANF
Australian Nursing Federation.

ANF
2-Amino-7-NitroFluorene.

ANFO
Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil. Explosive mix.

anfractuous
Winding, sinuous, roundabout, circuitous. I suppose the pedanticism one encounters more often is anfractuosities.

ANG
(US) Air National Guard. Cf. ARNG.

angeblich
German adverb meaning `allegedly' and uninflected form of the adjective meaning `alleged.' From the separable verb angeben, `to witness.'

I just put this entry in here because the word angeblich popped into my consciousness but the meaning didn't pop into my consciousness and I had to look it up. If Warren were here, he would probably ask, with something between exasperation and genuine curiosity, ``Al, why are you telling me this?'' You're probably wondering the same thing. ``Warren,'' I would counter-ask, ``you mean about the popping and the not popping?'' ``No, Al. I mean `why are you telling me the meaning of the word angeblich?' [He'd be referring to the German word that means, or is claimed to mean, `allegedly.']''

``Oh,'' I'd say, ``I have to dust off and brush up my German, and the only way I can do that and still advance the great work of building the SBF Glossar [German for glossary] is if I write entries about German words. `Leverage the synergy,' as they say.'' It would gradually come out that next June, I'm taking my mom to visit Breslau, now called Wroclaw. She was born there and thirteen years later she left; this will be her first time back.

I don't want to give you the impression that Warren would only ask petulant or sore questions. He could also make possibly helpful suggestions, like ``why don't you get a guide who speaks English instead of German?'' (It doesn't work; the guide, Ryszard, is apparently a unique resource. He serves a clientele of former Breslau residents, collecting and retelling anecdotes about Breslau then and now. His advertising is strictly word-of-mouth.)

The preceding parts of this entry were written before our June 2005 trip. I can add that some of the word-of-mouth came from Ryszard's. On our way out of the hotel one morning, we stopped near some disoriented Germans whom Ryszard gave his card. There's a large traffic of former Breslauers and their descendants, a fact you can easily understand if you read our Breslau entry.

angel
Technical term for a private investor with altruistic motives for making an investment in addition to the usual financial ones. Similar to a white knight.

Theatrical productions, particularly if they're not musicals, are so risky that anyone who underwrites a show is an angel.

Here's a brief investigation of other angels.

Angelicum
See PUST.

anglicismo
Spanish: `Anglicism.' The word is used countably (un anglicismo) for a word or expression borrowed, or constructed on the basis of, or influenced by English. (More below on the various possibilities.) The word is also used uncountably ([el] anglicismo) for the English influence itself.

I just got around to reading a 1957 article in the Revista de Filologia Española: ``Los anglicismos en España y su papel en la lengua oral'' [`Anglicisms in Spain and their role in spoken language'], vol. 41, pp. 141-160. It's pretty interesting, and fifty years on, it might be soon enough to revisit.

Author Howard Stone begins by noting that the greatest influence on Spanish during the middle ages was Arabic. [Raphael Lapesa, Historia de la lengua española (Madrid: Escelicer, 2/e 1950) is cited for a figure of 4000 examples.] I'm just going to be paraphrasing and summarizing for a while, so you can tack ``according to Stone'' onto any bald statements to follow, though the statements don't happen to be particularly controversial, afaik.

French was the second-greatest influence on Spanish, particularly in the 13th, 18th, and 19th centuries. That's an interesting selection of centuries there. Maybe we'll have a galicismo entry some day. Until then, you could check out Rafael Baralt, Diccionario de galicismos... (Madrid: Impr. Nacional, 1855; Buenos Aires 2/e, 1945). (The nominal clan of Rafaels sure has been active in the study of foreign influences on Spanish. But perhaps not disproportionately active, since Rafael is a popular Spanish given name.) By the middle of the twentieth century, English was the greatest influence, and possibly the most important linguistic peninsular development in contemporary Spanish. (Trust me, this is a fair translation from the Spanish, but it sounds less hokey in Spanish.) The article presents a list of something under 500 anglicisms, and Stone is quick to concede that any reader could think of others that were omitted. I say, he should have found any reader and asked him what those others were. He did get, from a man with the imposing name of Emérito Paniagua Comendador, the gift of Paniagua's own list of Anglicisms.

Stone took a somewhat expansive view of what counts as un anglicismo, which just makes my job harder. For the time being, let me mention some of the oldest direct examples:

  1. arrurruz < arrowroot
  2. este < east
  3. monís < moneys
  4. norte < north
  5. oeste < west
  6. ron < rum
  7. sur < south

(The compass points came via French.)

Anglofem, Anglo.fem, Anglo Fem
Back in 2003, ahead of its fifth annual conference, it described itself as ``a network association of women who work as teachers and researchers in the English departments of universities in the Netherlands.'' The conferences are ``a day of inspiring talks and informal networking.'' In 2007, they sent out an announcement for a one-day ``symposium on Networks and Networking.'' Paper 1 has the title ``Networks analyzing networks.'' Other papers are less involuted, but still. It's now ``an organization of female academics working in the fields of English and American studies.''

There was a time when the Dutch spoke the least foreign English: they learned it well and there was hardly an identifiable ``Dutch accent.'' The Germans, by contrast, had strong accents; Henry Kissinger's accent would count as ``very slight'' in the spectrum of those old, frequently parodied accents (das mascheen iss nisht foor gefingerpoken). At least since the 1980's, judging from the scientists and engineers I know, English is being learned well by Germans, and some of the Dutch may have backslid a little bit. That's why it's encouraging to see such an ugly neologism as Anglofem used by Dutch teachers of English. It shows that they are finely attuned to the crass academic argot of American universities.

Anglo-Saxonia
A rare and not particularly pretty term. It's used sufficiently infrequently that one may regard it as a nonce term that is independently reinvented every few years. In various Lexis-Nexis searches, the earliest instance of the term that I found was in a January 15, 1991, article in the Financial Times (London), which put the term in quotes, though no one in particular was quoted. Anglo-Saxonia seems to have been used perhaps 10 times (including once in a German publication) in the 17 years since then, in the various publications searchable by Lexis-Nexis. In some cases, particularly in economic reporting, it clearly means the English-speaking countries of the developed world. In an instance or two it refers to English-speaking people. Over the same period (since April 1991, actually) the term Anglophonie has occurred in 94 different items similarly searchable -- mostly in French, a few times in German. This is clearly the preferred term.

Ångström
A metric unit of length, abbreviated Å, equal to a tenth of a nanometer or 100 picometers (0.1 nm = 100 pm = 1 Å). You can write it ångström or Angstrom or (my favorite) Ángstrøm or any other way you like, but spelling Rabbit (see below) with three m's is probably a mistake. For something about the funny vowels, see the Aa entry.

The Bohr radius is about half an Ångström, so all atoms have diameters of one or a few Ångströms. Optical wavelengths are on the order of thousands of Ångströms (the visible spectrum is roughly 4000Å to 8000Å; your eyesight may vary), and when I was growing up the wavelengths of atomic spectral lines were typically known to about an Ångström, so it was a convenient unit for giving those.

The unit is popular among physicists but not officially recognized as part of the SI. (Technically, SI accepts the temporary continued use of this unit and the liter. This is leading by running out in front of a moving parade. Run'em over!) During the 1980's, the Ångström lost ground to the nanometer, certainly in part due to the limited character sets of graphing programs. The unit is named after the Swedish spectroscopist Anders Jonas Ångström (1814-1874). I think it was Knut, the son of Anders, who was influential in having Rutherford be awarded the Chemistry Nobel instead of the Physics. If physicists held grudges, the nanometer would rule. I suppose the best-known Angstrom today is the eponymous ``Rabbit'' of John Updike's series of novels (Harry Angstrom). The comment about the three m's is an allusion to the black-bra entry.

AnH
Anhang. German for `appendix,' and an excellent example of calque. See the WoO entry for a specialized usage.

Appendix in the anatomical sense is Blinddarm. Der Darm is `the intestine' (the plural Därme is also used), so der Blinddarm is the false intestine (cf. English pitchblende and zincblende).

anhydrite
Good guess is calcium sulfate, CaSO4.

ANI
American Nuclear Insurers.

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ANI
Automatic (telephone) number identification. Not the same as CLID

anil
A shrub found in the West Indies (according to OSPD4), and throughout the Scrabble tablelands (according to the SBF glossary).

ANIM
L'Alliance nationale de l'industrie musicale. `The National Alliance of the Music Industry.' There doesn't seem to be an English version of this page. If nationale here means `Canadian,' then `musicale' refers to Francophonic music. (Francophonic is just a nonce word. It seemed appropriate.) On the other hand, if `musicale' just refers to music generally, then nationale here might mean `French-Canadian.'

I don't really care about the language. I couldn't understand the lyrics any better if they were in Chinese Pig Latin. (You know, Angpay ingchay, etc. Getting the tones right can be a hassle, particularly in music.) You need to visit the entry for Jukka Ammondt, the Finn who sings Elvis songs in Latin. Tell'm Lord Mondegreen sentcha.

animal shelter
A currently favored term for places that receive stray animals and ones legally removed from individual private custody. Many ``shelters'' euthanize unwanted animals (those not readily ``rehomed''). ``Shelters'' that refuse on principle to put down relatively healthy animals are called by a qualified version of this term: ``no-kill shelters.'' So ``shelter'' is a rather ironic term in general, and I prefer the old term ``pound'' (where animals are ``impounded'').

ANIP
Australian National Internships Program. Oh, just a little for me.

AnIsl
Annales islamologiques. A publication of IFAO.

anisotropic
Direction-dependent.

anisotropic etch
An etch with an etch rate that is different in different directions. In wet etching, the direction-dependence has to do with crystallographic axis: some planes are harder to etch than others.

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Anistoriton
``Anistoriton is a free and independent magazine of History, Archaeology & Art History edited by D. I. Loizos and an Editorial Committee. Anistoriton is the Greek word for `ignorant in history.' It is an attempt to bridge the gap between professional historians and archaeologists and their specialized research, on the one hand, and the general public, the true history and archaeology lovers, on the other.''

ANK
Alphabet, Numerals, and Katakana. A very spare eight-bit character encoding for Japanese. The lower half of the character map is interpreted according to JIS for Roman (romaji) encoding, and the upper half maps half-width katakana. Half-width katakana characters are katakana without the diacritical marks that distinguish ba/ha/pa, sa/za, da/ta, etc. The two diacritical marks, which appear to the upper right of the basic kana, are encoded in the map as separate characters, the last two in the map. Also, some kana that are largely but not completely obsolete (wi, we) are not encoded.

ANK is suitable for simple segmental displays (typically LED displays or VFD's). Some of these make an arrangement to represent the diacriticals more appropriately than as separate characters. (Halfwidth kana can look a bit ugly; just imagine résumé as re'sume'.)

When hiragana is available, katakana is used only to write recent (last 500 years') foreign borrowings. Nevertheless, when the diacriticals are used, katakana can represent the entire phonemic inventory of Japanese. Indeed, more: some kana-diacritical combinations are used to represent only sounds that don't occur in Japanese, rather as English uses kh. One that is commonly used: u with the voicing diacritic represents vu. (Hebrew uses what looks like a bold grave accent after -- i.e., to the left of -- native consonants to indicate related foreign sounds.)

What one loses when writing Japanese uniformly in katakana (or kana generally) is not phonetic but semantic. Japanese has far fewer different syllables than English, and though Japanese words tend to have more syllables, homophones are still much more common. Using kanji reduces ambiguity, somewhat as different spellings of English homophones does (e.g., signet and cygnet; cereal and serial, red and read; reed and read; led and lead, LEED, Lied, and lead; lie and lye; I'm just having fun here -- you can skip to the next sentence; meat, mete, and meet; lamb and lam, some and sum; ton and tun; ball and bawl; new and knew; no and know; peel and peal; bee and be; buss and bus; tax and tacks; clew and clue (well...); knit and nit; its and it's; there and their; there's and theirs; here and hear; hair and hare; air and heir; R&R, and are and arr; hoar and another word; me and mi; bore and boar; bite and byte; won and one; to, too, and two; fore, for, and four, the (stressed) and thee; would it be cheating to mention disc and disk?; deck and deque?; choir and quire; slay and sleigh; tray and trey; fey and fay; bay and bey; pray and prey; fryer and friar; pie and pi; tale and tail; rale and rail; born and borne; there's no particular order to these, by the way; why and wye; pearl and Perl (and perl); carrot, caret, and carat (and karat); shoot and chute; chord and cord; pried and pride; pries, prise, and prize; lime and Lyme; lane and lain; lade and laid; bale and bail; wail and wale (and in most cases whale); weal and wheel; wont and want; tract and tracked; pleas and please; wether, weather and whether; wither and whither; foreword and forward; hi, hie, and high; desserts (noun) and deserts (verb); fort and forte (sometimes); tire and tier; tier and tear; tare and tear; stare and stair; bare and bear; beer and bier; road, rode, rowed, and Rhode (Island) ; stake and steak; steal, steel, and stele; seamen, semen, and siemen; pail and pale; peer and pier; pear, pare, and pair; flew, flue, and flu; deign and Dane; blue and blew; stew and Stu; dug and Doug; shoe and shoo; lo and low; oh and O; an and Anne; cane, Cain, and Kane; able and Abel; kneel and Neil (and Neal); mic and mike (and Mike); aught and ought; turn and tern; earn, erne, and urn; birth and berth; hight and height (oh yeah, happens all the time); white and wight; flee and flea; through and threw; sine and sign; from and frum; metal and mettle; medal and meddle; mind and mined; find and fined; bait and bate; bead and Bede; need, knead, and kneed; yoke and yolk; would and wood; gilt and guilt; wine and whine; look, I realize that some weirdos pronounce wh as /hw/, stop wining about it; mule and mewl; role and roll; this is easier than doing a crossword puzzle, and cheaper; bored and board; duel and dual; rho, row, and roe; doe and dough; rough and ruff; do and doo (and due, for nonpalatizers); tule and tool; mill and mil; neigh and nay; aye, eye, I, and i-; son and sun; tore and tor; matte and mat; nappe and nap; stayed and staid; not and knot; rout and route; route and root; dies and dyes; stile and style; vane and vain; wain and wane; poll and pole; pall and pawl; all and awl (even de bard hadda problem wit'dis -- are you mechanical?); so and sew; toe and tow; ate and eight; mite and might; right, rite, wright, and write; cite, site, and sight; night and knight; there are probably entire webpages devoted to this stuff; hale and hail; ail and ale; mail and male; sail and sale; bin and been (usually); bean and been (some Brit.); bred and bread; this is beginning to be tiresome; tide and tied; sees, seas, and seize; tee and tea, tees, teas, and tease; vial and vile; mien and mean; call and caul; principal and principle; pour and pore (and for some poor); plate and plait; wear, ware, and where; we're and weir; were and whir; dear and deer; and in some but not all common pronunciations: ant and aunt; can't and cant; beet and beat; then (when unstressed) and than, effect (noun) and affect (verb); complacent and complaisant (q.v.); complementary and complimentary; tort and torte; sentry and century). (Kanji writing, like English spelling, is not phonetic. But it doesn't pretend to be.)

Oooh, I thought of some more: assent and ascent, stoop and stoep.

This entry started out to be about a reduced Japanese character-set encoding, didn't it? Oh well, I lost interest. There are other entries that talk about Japanese. It was more important to put in links to all those words above that are personally important to you. Yes -- you! (Yew? Yoo?) You've heard that radio commercial for the product that promises to put words directly into your head, effortlessly and without repetition, including the fifty or whatever most important ``power words''? The concerned announcer, with a voice poised between grief and grievance, explains that ``people judge you by the words you use... draw conclusions about your education, even your intelligence!'' (Correct conclusions.) They report research proving that a bad vocabulary can sink you faster than bad breath! Well I'm here to tell you that bad spelling can sink you faster than a led anchor. And not just any bad spelling. Everyone makes typos -- that's no big deal. But if you use a correctly spelled wrong word, people draw the conclusion that you don't know which word is which! Worst of all, spell-checkers won't save you, because you've spelled the wrong word correctly! CALL KNOW and oh weight a second -- that wasn't my point at all. The important thing was

Look folks, I'm really sorry about this, but here's the situation. This entry is having a hard time finishing itself up, but in the meantime other entries on this same page are ready and have been tapping their shoes for weeks waiting to be published. So really I'm very sorry, but we're going to have to let this entry go out half-dressed so the show can go on. I'm sure you've been in a similar situation yourself, in seventh-grade choir, say, so you'll understand.

ANL
Argonne National Laboratory. Near Chicago.

ANM
AcryloNitrile acid Methacrylate. A/k/a acrylonitrile-acrylate rubber. A plastic.

Anm
Anmerkung. German noun meaning `remark.'

ANM
ANswering machine Message.

ANM
ANswer Message. (SS7 acronym.)

ANN
Aero-News Network. (A website for news having to do with airplanes.

ANN
Artificial Neural Network. Not only have they demonstrated useful capabilities like A-D conversion [D. W. Tank and J. Hopfield: ``Simple neural optimization networks: an A/D converter, signal decision circuit and a linear programming circuit,'' IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, 33, #5, pp. 533-632 (1986)], but also things like schizophrenia [for example: W. E. Lowell and G. E. Davis, ``Predicting length of stay for psychiatric diagnosis-related groups using neural networks,'' Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 1, #6, pp.459-466 (1994).

ANNA
American Nephrology Nurses' Association. Based in Pitman, New Jersey.

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AnnNap
Annali della Facolta di lettere e filosofia Universita di Napoli. Italian. Impossible to guess what it could mean in English.

annuitant
I only encountered this ugly word for the first time yesterday. It turns out to be quite a common word in certain circles, so I suppose one should be happy that it is merely exceptionally and not spectacularly ugly. Instead of counting as blessings all the years I passed in blissful ignorance of it, I wondered how I could possibly have gone so long without becoming, so to speak, vested in this word. I guess it takes a long time to qualify.

There are actually two competing definitions of annuitant. According to some it is a person entitled to receive benefits from an annuity. According to others it is a person who does. If you google on annuitant alone, you get (I mean I just got) a bit under a million hits. If you add the search term definition, you still get 300,000. Under the circumstances, it's almost surprising there isn't greater disagreement on the meaning. Oh wait, there's more. An annuitant is also a formally retired U.S. intelligence officer who is still on the government's payroll and available for assignments. For when you want to bring back Sean Connery for a special assignation, I guess, or something like that.

Checking around, I find the word in an inspirationally titled softcover from 1974: My Purpose Holds: Reactions and Experiences in Retirement of TIAA-CREF Annuitants (by Mark H. Ingraham with the collaboration of James M. Mulanaphy). An interesting feature of this title is that the subtitle is separated from the short title by an explicit colon. Okay, I looked inside. It contains a lot of quotes from retirees describing what their lives are like.

anodize
To anodize is to oxidize electrolytically. A conductor (generally a metal) whose surface is to be anodized is made part of the anode (i.e., it is connected to the positive terminal) in an electrochemical cell. In response to the applied voltage. The current is carried partly by negative ions (anions) that flow towards the anode, where they react with the anode material. Various electrolytes with oxyanions are used to oxidize the anode, but sulfuric acid is the most common. So far as I know, anodization generally refers to oxidation in the narrow sense of forming an oxide, and not the general chemical sense of increasing the oxidation number of the metal (which could be done by forming a sulfide, say).

Lord forgive me for ever claiming that anodize meant ``electroplate,'' which sounds similar but means almost the opposite.

anon.
ANONymous.

anon
Soon, or at some later time. These meanings represent a bit of a modern come-down. In Middle English, the word meant `at once.' In Old English, it meant that manifestly, since it was constructed from words meaning `in one.' Amusingly, it was spelled ``on an'' or ``onan.'' Onan is the standard transliteration of a well-known Hebrew word meaning `power' or `strength,' but it's better known as the name of the Biblical character who `spilled his seed.' Dorothy Parker said she named a pet bird after him.

Anopolis
stand-alone document containing information about Internet Freeware Shareware Programming Languages for the Macintosh (hence, formerly known as IFSPLM) from Antreas P. Hatzipolakis, in DocMaker format.

ANOVA
ANalysis Of VAriance.

ANP
Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau. (It's not a typo, it's sic: pers and not pres.) `General Press Bureau of the Netherlands.' The main Dutch national news agency. They have an English service called NIS.

ANPA
Alternative Natural Philosophy Association. Nuttier than a squirrel's paradise.

ANPA
Association Nationale de Prévention de l'Alcoolisme. A French organization that became ANPAA while I was ``out.''

ANPAA
Association Nationale de Prévention en Alcoologie et Addictologie. Previously ANPA.

ANPEA
Association Nationale des Parents d'Enfants Aveugles ou gravement déficients visuels avec ou sans handicaps associés. Apnea is something else again.

ANPEI
The Association of Nurses of Prince Edward Island.

ANPR
Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. I'm pleased to be able to report that the expansion of this term with ``Advanced'' is an error (once uglifying this very page and continuing to do the same to many thousands of others, but still an error). So the take-home here is that I'm pleased. I'm letting you know in advance that I plan to be complaisant. Some people actually care what the proposed rules say; I try not to focus on that, because I'm not really very hopeful.

ANPRM
Advance Notice of Proposed RuleMaking. An alternative initialism equivalent to ANPR. ANPRM is roughly twice as common as ANPR, but I propose -- as a rule -- to regard equivalent alternatives as equivalent. (I plan to start ignoring this rule immediately.)

ANPSA
Association Nationale Pour les Sourds-Aveugles.

ANR
Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights.

ANR
Applied Nursing Research.

ANR
Association Neurofibromatoses et Recklinghausen.

ANRED
Anorexia Nervosa and Related Eating Disorders. Ummm -- I was thinking... as long as you weren't going to be eating that -- I mean, if it's okay with you....

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ANRW
Aufsteig und Niedergang der römischen Welt. German, `Rise and Fall of the Roman World.' An up-to-date online index for ANRW was developed by Jim Ruebel and Ross Scaife, with Perl scripts originally written by Oscar Nierstrasz and later tweaked by Raphael Finkel.

It's a small world. The editor of this glossary was at university with Oscar Nierstrasz.

ANS
Advanced Network & Services, Inc., originally (1990) a nonprofit consortium to promote high-speed networking, but it gets technical after that.

ANS
American National Standard. Generally as designated by ANSI, upon its approval of draft standards submitted by standards bodies delegated by ANSI.

ANS
American Neurotology Society. The old site still has material not yet on the new one.

ANS
American Nuclear Society. Their site plays on the fact that ans. is an abbreviation of answer. An industry that has certainly been extensively questioned.

ANS
American Numismatic Society. In contrast with the similarly named numismatic Exchange (ANE), the ANS is a learned society. Founded in 1858, a constituent society of the ACLS since 1937. ACLS has an overview.

Wow, urgent developments!

ans.
Standard abbreviation of answer.

As Gertrude Stein lay dying, she asked ``What is the answer?'' There was no reply, and after a pause she laughed and said ``In that case what is the question?'' Sic, I'm sure; she was pretty parsimonious with commas. According to Donald Sutherland in Gertrude Stein, A Biography of her Work, ``[t]hen she died.'' That's elegant, I suppose, but maybe she just stopped talking and died two hours later, or maybe she went into Cheyne-Stokes breathing. When did she lose bladder control? Sometimes, the better part of wisdom is not seeking the answers or even the questions. (Oh, you think this discussion is in poor taste? At least it's not meretricious self-disclosure. For that you want to wallow pretentious in the blow-by-blow of Melanie's personal battle with legal drugs. While there, you can ``experience the goddess collection.'')

It is widely claimed, though I haven't seen a good source, that the last words of Pancho Villa were spoken to a reporter:

Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.

Maybe in a movie?

ANS
N-Arylamino-NaphthaleneSulfonate. Which arylamino group, you ask? Good question. You have choices. You could use those choices to study the photochemical pathways, as Edward M. Kosower and Hanna Dodluk did in a series of papers in the 1970's.

ANS
Autonomic Nervous System.

A.N.S.H.D.A.
Asociación de Niños con Síndrome de Hiperactividad y Déficit de Atención. Spanish, `Association of Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.'

ANSI
American National Standards Institute.

ANSI ASC X12
American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Accredited Standards Committee X12 (ASC X12, q.v.).

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ANSI/IEEE 455-1985
``IEEE Standard Test Procedure for Measuring Longitudinal Balance of Telephone Equipment Operating in the Voice Band.'' Describes measurement method for longitudinal-to-metallic balance.

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ANSI/IEEE 743-1984
``IEEE Standard Methods and Equipment for Measuring the Transmission Characteristics of Analog Voice Frequency Circuits.'' Describes measurement methods for level, frequency, noise, S/N ratio, envelope delay distortion, impulse noise, phase and gain hits, dropout, phase and amplitude jitter, return loss, peak-to-average ratio, intermodulation distortion, crosstalk, and slope.

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ANSI/IEEE 820-1984
``IEEE Standard Telephone Loop Performance Characteristics.'' Includes definitions, measurement methods, and objectives for loss, frequency response, noise, and longitudinal balance of subscriber loops.

ANSI X12
Vide ASC X12.

ANSI X3.23-1974
A COBOL specification. Implemented as the standard IBM COBOL compiler.

ANSMET
ANtarctic Search for METeorites program Antarctica is a good place to search, because rocks on the surface of the ice and snow tend to be new.

ANSORP
Asian Network for Surveillance Of Resistant Pathogens.

ANSP
Air Navigation Service Provider.

ANSTO
Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. Succeeded the AAEC in 1986.

answering title
The head term of this entry is provisional, and I'm open to suggestions for a different one. The entry is about (or primarily about, if it comes to that) book titles that somehow ``answer'' other book titles. So far I have one:
  1. PROVOCATION by Peter D. Kramer:
    Listening to Prozac:
    A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self.
    REACTION by Peter R. Breggin, M.D., and Ginger Ross Breggin:
    Talking Back to Prozac:
    What Doctors Aren't Telling You About Today's Most Controversial Drug.

So far, the reactions are winning on rhyme points. This entry should probably include Souls Without Longing (currently discussed at the miscellaneous book titles entry), although the title it replies to (Souls With Longing) was discarded before its book was published; it's possible the authors of the second book were unaware of the other (working) title. I'll deal with this when I clean up the book titles entry.

Ant
Antlia. Official IAU abbreviation for the constellation.

ANT, Ant
Common abbreviation for Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra. Well, perhaps it's not common, but I saw it used in a big book once. Hmm. It does seem to be common as an abbreviation for Anthony in the script.

ANT
The Authentic New Testament. A translation of the Koine original in non-ecclesiastic language (``community'' instead of ``church,'' etc.). Published by Hugh J. Schonfield. He spent thirty years on this project. Some people have no respect for the value of their own time. In 1985, he came out with The Original New Testament (ONT), but I don't know just how that's different (aside from having a different title and copyright date).

ANTA
Australian National Training Authority. It's ``an Australian Government statutory authority providing a national and industry-led focus for vocational education and training (VET).''

antarctick
In the Pantologia (1813), this is defined only as an adjective describing ``[s]omething opposite to the arctic or northern pole... [so the antarctick] pole is the south pole; and antarctick circle is a less circle [what is now called a small circle] of the sphere, at a distance of 23° 28' from the south pole.''

antanaclasis
A figure of speech of the pun kind. It's the kind where a word or phrase is repeated with different meanings. It's clear, of course, that that is not all there is to it, as the repeated word in this sentence illustrates. Usually one only applies the term to instances in which two or more uses are contrastive or in some literary way, uh, pungent. Sorry. Anyway, it can hardly be a figure of speech if it's standard usage.

Antanaclases are usually more clever than funny. Here are some examples:

If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.

-- Vince Lombardi

Learn some craft when young, that when old you may live without craft.

-- proverbial

A good compound example is at the Dew-Drop Inn entry, but it's funny. (It's plausibly but not demonstrably attributed to Groucho Marx.) Franklin's famous advice about hanging together is alluded to in the frass entry.

A marginal or mild antanaclasis occurs in the U2 song ``In God's Country'':

The rivers run but soon run dry.
A different kind of pun also occurs in this song, something like a syllepsis on the word ribbons:
Dress torn in ribbons and in bows.
(That's if one takes the view that the lyrics are intelligible. For the alternative possibility, straight from lyricist Fogerty's mouth, see the ``Proud Mary'' discussion under octane number. Then again, I suppose there can be an intelligible pun within unintelligible gibberish. Bubble-gumshoes sleep furiously. Agent Orange Crush retorting for Doody. You know, I really want to comment here that Joyce is contagious, but it's too early in the entry.)

Running rivers are a very popular image in song, beyond verging on trite. In fact, U2's ``One Tree Hill'' explores the conjugation of ``run like a river to the sea'' (you run, it runs, we run; also the imperative form). The song is a threnody for Greg Carroll, a friend of Bono's who was killed by a drunk driver while running an errand for him in Dublin. I suspect all this Dublin river running partly alludes to Joyce's Finnegans Wake (a book that is a play on words in its entirety).

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AnTard
Antiquité tardive. `Late Antiquity,' a French classics journal catalogued by TOCS-IN.

ANTF
Anabolic Nutrient Timing Factor.

Here is something I read on the Internet about this important body-building topic:

I first learned about the ANTF through Paul Cribb B.S. Sci. HMS. Paul is a research scientist whom studies muscular dynamics he is also the research director for the supplement company AST Sports Sciences.

There is no explanation of what studies muscular dynamics do to or with pointy musclehead Paul. The CFT who wrote the paragraph also got the title somewhat off. It's apparently ``B.H. Sci. HMS.'' I suppose that stands for ``Bachelors in Health Science HMS.'' (I don't know what HMS stands for here.)

anth
ANTHropology.

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Anth. Pal.
Anthologia Palatina.

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anti-
One is used to thinking of `anti-' as a Greek root meaning against, or opposed, but its meaning is a bit richer. It has a spatial meaning `over against,' `opposite' meaning `in front of,' very much like the English use of `opposite.' It can mean `in place of': a Greek says a guest is `as good as' or even `the same (!) as' (anti) a brother. The bottom line is that sometimes `anti' can mean `same as' (as in the above example, and in the adjective `antitheos' = `like to a god' [not `against the gods' or `atheistic' or `the opposite of a god']; sometimes it means the opposite, `opposite to' or `opposed to,' `contrary' as in `antithesis' and a very large number of other words. However, there is no evidence for the historical priority of one or the other of these meanings. Thus antiphilia (mutual affection) and antonomasia.

anticline
Anticline -- that's, like, a geology term, isn't it? Well as it happens, I've been reading a geology book, Introduction to the Structure of the Earth, so if you just hang on, I should have a definition for you shortly. Come think of it, I think I just saw that word -- yeah, Figure 1-3b, page six, the caption says: ``Aerial photographs such as this one of Little Dome anticline in Wyoming are used as a base for regional geological mapping. (U.S. Geological Survey Photograph.)''

Hmmm. Not quite enough information for a definition. ``Little Dome'' is inside a topographical feature that looks like a whorl on your fingerprint. But bigger. And the lines are concentric rather than spiral as in a true fingerprint whorl, but really, without turning your hand over, how many of you could so much as tell me how many of your fingers have deltas? Hm-hmm, just what I thought. Anyway, a definition is probably coming up real soon.

...

Ahh! Here's something a couple of pages later, Figure 1-4. It's a side view, a cross section of the earth's surface sort of like an ant farm. About as complicated as an ant farm too. The source is ``After C. F. Lamb in Halbouty, 1980. Used by courtesy of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.'' It says ``Production is from the Nugget sandstone on an anticline above a branch off of the Absaroka thrust fault.'' And it appears to be in Wyoming again. Well, there you have it: an anticline is

a geological feature from which oil or gas can be produced. A number are found in Wyoming.

There. It could be a bit more technical, I suppose, but the SBF glossary is free and it's under construction. Also, we know you're interested in getting those helpful insider details, like about Wyoming, that smarten you up and make you sound like a professional. You can throw off stuff like ``Oh, yeah, another anticline -- just saw one in Wyoming last month wildcatting.'' Real cool. Blend right in with the people who do it for a living. Maybe I'll fill in with some more details later.

Well, now it's later. I've been thinking about the definition. It's pretty good from a practical point of view, the sound-smarter-through-bigger-vocabulary point of view (POV). Still, it does sort of have that ``a chair is something you can sit on'' feel. Of course -- a chair is something you can sit on if it isn't stacked with books, but then, so is the floor (FYI: a floor may be harder on the butt, and to fall off of, though YMMV). But in these cases you could say the floor is functioning as a chair, so basically it's a chair. And a spare tire leaning against a wall is a chair too. No problem, really.

But the thing is, I've been slogging through the book, and I have to admit I'm growing a little bit disappointed in myself. I read and read, but I don't, like, see the definitions, know what I mean? This book is an ``Introduction,'' and there I was in the introductory chapter (chapter 1 has the same title as the book), and I wasn't feeling very introduced. Let's face it: geology is a deep subject, and you have to be pretty sharp to cut it in that field. You dig what I'm sayin'? It's rocket science, and when you think of rocket science, you think of Forbidden Planet. And where did that vanished genius race put all its technology? You got it: deeeeep underground.

The machine is a cube twenty miles on a side!

You can imagine if those geology majors are geniuses, or study hard to compensate, that the professors must be gods. What about the author of this geology book I've been reading? Edgar W. Spencer. Parmly Professor of Geology, Washington and Lee University. Taught at Hunter while attending Columbia. Department chairman at W&L since 1959. A Fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). You can sense the understated confidence. And he's written a couple of other books. And -- what's this? -- there on the dedication page it says

To the Memory of
Two Outstanding Teachers

Arie Poldervaart
Walter Bucher

That just chokes me up, y'know? I mean, I mean I, I gotta, I gotta blow my nose. Frnfrnfrnfrnfrnfrnfrnfrnfrnfrnzzz! HRNFRNfrnfrnfrnfrnfr,shnfrnfrnfrnzzz!!!

It's such a moving testimony to the tradition of scholarship and mentorship! I have this beatific image -- Drs. Poldervaart and Bucher, perched in heaven, smiling down on their old student Edgar, nodding in kindly encouragement as he struggles to make the third edition of his Introduction (©1969, 1977, 1988) even clearer than before. Of course, they're in geologist heaven, so maybe they're smiling up at him. I'm not sure. It might help explain why the vertical axis on Figure 1-4 has Wyoming's surface at a depth of four kilometers, decreasing to negative depths below the anticline, whatever it was.

That does it! I'm energized; with this fantastic introductory textbook I'm going to turn the anticline thing around!

And I know just what to do: to the index! Sure, why didn't I think of this earlier? There:

Anticlines, 179, 305, 309.
Okay, so on page 179 it says that ``[s]alt ridges and anticlines are elongate domal features. Examples are found in the subsurface off the coast of Texas and Florida. These commonly form as a succession of anticlines and synclines.''

Hmmm. This method may not be as effective as I had hoped. I didn't even know that Texas and Florida had a coast in common. Now I need to look up salt ridges to see if I can disentangle the description.

You have to ask yourself: did the accomplished educator who wrote this book really mean for the student to go all the way to page 305, encountering anticline after anticline, without some sort of working definition? Not likely. If he had, his textbook would be as disorganized and incomplete and pedagogically frustrating as a certain glossary I know of.

Hey! That's it! Glossary, page 469:

Anticline. See Fold.

We're almost there! I can sense it! Page 474: Flow fold, (Fold) Height, (Fold) Hinge, Hinge line, .... Auugh! What happened? Is there some other kind of ``Fold.''? Not an entry? Not the binding crack? Should I go to the chapter on Fold? The table of contents suggests only Ch. 17 -- ``Folding in Theory and Experiment.'' Pages 362-385. It's surprising that everything seems to be explained in terms of something that is itself explained later on in the book. I guess that's to keep you interested. The last pages are going to be pretty explosive.

Time out! I need a warm, nourishing hamburger, with crisp but deceptively greasy fries.

Mmmm. All praise ketchup, the soul-soothing sauce! I feel balanced, relaxed, fat-free, confident. I -- what's this? The definition of anticline appears like a vision before my moistening eyes --

A fold with older rocks in its core.
Right there in good ol' Edgar W. Spencer's glossary, under Fold [A deformation of preexisting rock surface that is convex in a single sense. (Carey, 1962.)]

As I should have realized immediately, the glossary is hierarchical, perhaps a bit like the author. The Fold entry just happens to consist of three pages of other entries (including ``Flow fold,'' etc.) that are distinguished from main headwords printed in the identical font, size, and style.

Obviously, the anticline illustrated in Figure 1-3b is a fold outcrop that has been eroded to leave a surface that is really a cross section of the fold. The concentric ovals indicate that the feature was convex in two directions and not one, but the ovals are fairly eccentric (i.e., elongated in one direction), so it pretty much conforms to Carey's definition borrowed by Spencer. You remember from pg. 179: ``elongate domal features.'' There, now, that wasn't so hard!

Relief! But, well, now I have a confession to make. An embarrassing admission, really. Now I know what you're thinking: ``If you, a big-shot glossary author, don't have it all together, then what hope is there for shiftless stupid nobodies like us?'' I take your point, yet I must disappoint.

I've been putting up a brave front, but the truth is that I've been a secret skeptic, a doubter. Like former US president Jimmy Carter, I mistrusted my true friends, and set myself up for betrayal by those I should have recognized as my enemies. I am a sinner. As Jimmy confessed to Playboy magazine, so too I have sinned in my heart. My sin is pride.

You see, I was beginning to think that maybe this textbook is not the great pedagogical monument that it obviously really is. I was harboring treacherous thoughts like ``why doesn't he say what the mantle is first and then talk about how important it is for understanding mesoscopic crustal features?'' O, me of little faith! (Or oh I myself of little faith! Whatever is the reflexive vocative form.)

How wrong I am! This textbook didn't become a great three-edition success by accident -- first it had to be selected by hundreds of geology professors. Can hundreds of geology professors be wrong? The answer is obvious, I should think. The popularity of this text tells us not only about the quality of the book itself, but also about the solicitude of the geology profession for its students. Yes, it tells us a lot. If only I could have figured that lot out by reading it. (I'm so moved that I'm going to cry again, but this time I'm not going to write the details into the anticline entry. Use your imagination.)

Cf. EMag entry. Incidentally, I see that in 1883, Dr. I.C. White conjectured that oil and gas deposits could be found in anticlines.

antidot
A region of limited extent where a quantum well is narrowed, typically by electrostatic depletion under a metal gate. By ``limited extent'' we mean many tens to a few hundreds of nanometers. The idea is that a regular array of antidots (one kind of superlattice) can function like the engineered semiconductor version of crystalline lattice (in two dimensions -- see 2DEG), and give rise to discernible banding, and possibly to somewhat exotic effects like Stark ladders and Bloch oscillations that are hard to observe in ordinary crystals, which have much smaller lattice spacing.

antielitism
The opposite of elitism, as well as the worst, most undemocratic version of elitism. Whereas for an elitist, words like good, better, acceptable, and excellent have validity, for an anti-elitist they are invalid because the great mass of humanity is presumed incapable of achieving anything that would be so described.

antient
An obsolete spelling of ancient. The OED2 gives its period of prevalence as the 16th to 18th centuries. It continued to be used as a variant spelling, but by the 20th century it was mostly a conscious anachronism. For example, Kingsley Amis referred in a 1979 poem to ``The Antient Laws of the Game'' of cricket.

anti-HCV
Antibodies to hepatitis C virus (HCV); vide s.v. hepatitis.

ANTIME
ANTarctic Ice Margin Evolution. A GLOCHANT program to coordinate research on the Antarctic sedimentary record.

antimonial
An antimony-containing compound.

antioxidants, anti-oxidants
In foods, these are very important preservatives, and are effective in very small quantities, because they function as moderators of a chain reaction. Oxidation of foods, particularly of the fat component of foods, proceeds by a free-radical process associated with double bonds (vide fats and oils).

Typical commercial antioxidants, like BHA, BHT, gallic acid and propyl gallate, are phenolic compounds that become stable free radicals when they release a single hydrogen. The resulting free radical can also release a second hydrogen to revert to a stable fully bonded compound. Both reactions terminate the auto-oxidation (also ``autoxidation'') chain reaction.

Chocolate is an excellent source of antioxidants.

antiplane
An antiplane is a fixed plane that can be defined in the analysis of elastic systems satisfying certain stress and strain conditions. If Cartesian coordinates are chosen so that the antiplane is z=0, then the condition to be satisfied by stress is that the x and y components of stress are independent of z. The strain condition is that the planes parallel to the antiplane (i.e., z=c, where c≠0) before deformation must no longer be parallel to it after deformation.

Here's the first paragraph of the preface of Antiplane Elastic Systems, by L.M. Milne-Thomson (Springer-Verlag, 1962):

   The term antiplane was introduced by L.N.G. Filon to describe such problems as tension, push, bending at couples, torsion, and flexure by a transverse load. Looked at physically these problems differ from those of plane elasticity already treated [in Milne-Thomson's Plane Elastic Systems, (Springer-Verlag, 1960)] in that certain shearing stresses no longer vanish.

The Filon article referred to is probably ``On Antiplane Stress in an Elastic Solid,'' Proc. Roy. Soc. vol. (A) 160, pp. 137-154 (1937). That's actually a pretty interesting article, and I plan to quote from it eventually.

antisemitism
The term Antisemitismus was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, a German antisemite, as a euphemism for Judenhass (`Jew hatred'). The agent or adherent noun Antisemit followed naturally. The words were borrowed almost immediately in English, where the proper-noun status of Semite (from Noah's son Shem) forced the capitalization and hyphenation: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Semite.

As a Jew, I have my own theories about the subject. I agree with much of the argument in Why The Jews? by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), but it's a big subject and this is a small entry.

Everyone recognizes that ``Anti-Semitism'' is not about Semites as such. It is about the ``Semites'' of antisemitic fantasy: Jews. Antisemites, since long before Marr, like to define Jews and themselves in ways complimentary to themselves, and since Marr they have liked to play with the confusion engendered by ``Semite.'' The historian James Parkes proposed the all-lower-case, unhyphenated spelling as a less inaccurate way to use a word that has become somewhat useful. Here is an explanation by the philosopher Emil Fackenheim: ``... the spelling ought to be antisemitism without the hyphen, dispelling the notion that there is an entity `Semitism' which `anti-Semitism opposes.'' [``Post-Holocaust Anti-Jewishness, Jewish Identity and the Centrality of Israel,'' in World Jewry and the State of Israel, ed. Moshe Davis (New York: Arno Pr., 1977), p. 11, n. 2.]

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antonomasia
In English, one of its meanings (also originally Greek) is "the substitution of a proper name for a common noun to designate a member of a group or class, as in calling a traitor a `Benedict Arnold'" (Am. Heritage Dict.). In Greek, it could also be used more generally for any rhetorical figure. If the sense of the prefix root ``anto-'' (``anti-'') seems odd to you, see anti entry.

Listen, Joe:
Gary and I are at the local Perkins. Toothpick-armed wait-person with hair in a severe bun takes our order like it's a big favor she resents doing. She leaves, I says to Gary I says ``Olive Oyl is in a bad mood.'' Gary glances suspiciously towards the Heinz.

Later I learned that her name is Kim. Not that you asked.

By the way, if you order mashed potatoes, tell them to nuke 'em twice, so the bottom isn't cold.

Time magazine's Notebook feature (issue of Oct. 21, 1996, p. 25) quoted

Larry Harmon (a.k.a. Bozo): ``It irks me when people use the character's name in a demeaning way.''
Larry Harmon bought the franchise rights to Bozo in 1956. There have been as many as 100 authorized Bozo portrayers working simultaneously in the US. Read more here.

Even though relatively few entries in this glossary involve the Spanish language, relatively many (two, to be precise) of the instances where the word antonomasia occurs do: see gringo and Hernán Cortés. This disproportion is probably not accidental.

antonym
It's mildly intriguing that while the cognates of synonym are common words in French and Spanish, the opposite almost seems to be true of antonym. (In case you don't know what an antonym is, it's the antonym of synonym.) For example, the only French and Spanish collections of these that are on the local reference shelves are a Larousse Grand Dictionnaire Synonymes & Contraires and a Vecchi Diccionario de Sinónimos y Contrarios. (The prepositionless style of the French title seems to be a Larousse conceit.) Okay, two others in French do use the word antonymes. But after doing all that exhausting research, I had to mention it even if it was only slightly mildly intriguing.

ANTS
A New Tax System. Name during drafting of the transportation Australian tax structure for transportation eventually implemented as A.N.A.T.

ants
Picnic plague. More serious information here.

ANU
Australian National University. Their Bioinformatics Hypermedia Service is popular.

ANUPA
Association for the New Urbanism in PennsylvaniA. A CNU chapter.

A friend of mine from high school is named Anupam Singhal, and for a while at least he was practicing medicine in Pennsylvania, so this makes sense. Well, it's a good mnemonic, anyway. For me. The Summer after eleventh grade, I think it was, his parents took him and his brother for a visit to the ancestral country, which I guess is Sri Lanka. The main thing he had to say about the visit when he got back was that it felt really weird to see his name everywhere. Now he can have the same experience on the Internet.

ANUSA
Australian National University Students' Association.

ANVV
Algemene Nederlanse Vereniging voor Vreemdelingenverkeer. `General Dutch Organization for Foreigners' Travel.' The old name commonly used by the NBT (National Board for Tourism), and apparently still the parent organization for this and the VVV, with NBT marketing travel to the Netherlands from abroad, and VVV marketing tourism internally and providing tourist information at local bureaus.

ANWR
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. An Alaskan wildlife refuge at a latitude that makes biodiversity a joke. Anwr.org is self-described as a ``grassroots organization working to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.'' Savearcticrefuge.org doesn't have a description meta tag, so it's impossible to guess that organization's political position.

Anything could happen.
We'll return with the end of this boring game after some words from our sponsors.

The last game of the 2008 Fighting Irish football season was the traditional humiliating defeat by USC. At the end of the post-game show on Notre Dame's hometown station, WSBT-AM, ahead of the recap of painfully lopsided game stats, one of the commentators suggested to the more sensitive listeners that they might `want to turn your radio down for the next three to five minutes.' The fellow who was about to (in a manner of speaking) run down the stats replied professionally that ``we never say that on radio.''

ANZAC, Anzac
Australia and New Zealand Army Corps. Australia has, in a certain moderately precise sense, only two national holidays, and Anzac Day, April 25, is one of them. It's a public holiday in New Zealand as well, and it ``honours those servicemen who lost their lives serving their respective countries.'' April 25, 1915, was the date of the extremely ill-fated landing at Gallipoli.

Australia's other national holiday is Australia Day. The rest of the major public holidays in Australia are discussed or at least listed at that entry as well.

ANZASA
Australia and New Zealand Association for American Studies.

ANZ Bank
Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. Based in Melbourne, it was Australia's fourth-largest bank as of November 2008.

ANZCCART, anzccart
Australian and New Zealand Council for the Care of Animals in Research and Teaching.

ANZECC
Australia New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council.

Anzug
German noun (masculine) meaning `suit.' This word is constructed somewhat like the English word pullover (British for `sweater'). Literally, Anzug can be interpreted as `pull-on.' In fact, an and Zog are cognates of the English words on and tug. Cf. Badeanzug.

ANZUS
Australian-New Zealand-United States security Treaty. Sometimes ``Anzus,'' as in Anzus Council, back before the Kiwis decided they were too moral for atoms and the organization had some utility.

AO
Academy of Osseointegration. What I wanted to know is answered in the organization's Dental Implants FAQ:

Beginning in the 1950s researchers observed that the metal titanium, and some other materials, formed a very strong bond to surrounding bone, a process termed ``osseointegration.''

After years of careful research and study, dental implants (titanium cylinders placed into the jawbone to support replacement teeth) were refined with high success rates. There are now patients who have had implant supported teeth for more than twenty-five years.

Thus osseointegration began a revolution in dentistry, and at last, an answer to the many problems associated with missing teeth.

AO
Acousto-Optic. One application of AO materials is in mode-locking of lasers: On an AO plate in the laser cavity, a standing-wave pattern is generated acoustically, which acts as a grating to deflect the beam and increase loss. (This effect is modulated with the characteristic frequency of laser-cavity oscillations to achieve mode-locking.)

Typical materials: TeO2 (Tellurium Oxide), PbMoO4, LiNbO3.

AO
Alpha Omega. The international dental fraternity. Why do I think AO should be pronounced as in Spanish -- ``Ow''?

When they get together for reunions, do they intone ``We are the alpha and the omega''?

(For the Christianity-impaired, that's a reference to Revelations 1:8.)

.ao
(Domain name code for) Angola. The Republic of Angola has an official page.

Here's a page with almost no information on Angola from city.net. Here's a decent map. The most useful information on such a map, and information not shown, is the areas subject to (demobilized, of course) UNITAS control. Luanda, the capital, is the seat of government for its entire metropolitan area.

You know, Angola is not simply connected: there's a bit of it called Cabinda on the other side of the Congo River, on the Atlantic coast between Congo and Congo Republic.

African Studies Center (at the University of Pennsylvania) offers a resource page. The Norwegian Council for Africa (NCA) has a Angola page.

Here's an item that made international news on Dec. 21, 2009: ``Angola Woman Kills Husband With Ax.'' God, those people are brutal savages! ``Court documents record that 44-year-old Norma Mote summoned police to the couple's home early Friday and told dispatchers she had just killed her husband with an ax. Police found 56-year-old Kevin Mote dead in a second-floor bedroom. The Steuben County coroner's office ruled his death due to numerous ax strikes to the head. Neighbors say the Mote family was quiet and kept to themselves in the area just outside Angola city limits about 40 miles north of Fort Wayne.'' Oh! It was Angola, Indiana.

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AO
Archaeology Odyssey. ``[A] colorful, exciting and informative journey to the ancient roots of the Western world. AO appeals to readers' sense of beauty, to their feelings of wonderment, to their longing for adventure and travel--and to their conviction that the past has many stories yet to tell.'' A publication of BAS.

AO
Area of Operations. US military jargon.

AO
Association of Orthodontists (Singapore).

AO
Atomic Orbital.

AO
French, Autres Objets, `Other Objects.' Printed matter other than cards and letters, such as books, sheet music, newspapers and magazines, glossy advertisements, catalogs...

International mail is divided into three general categories: LC (letters and cards), CP (parcel post), and AO.

AOA
Abort Once Around. Space shuttle abort plan; other options are ATO, RTLS, and TAL.

AoA
Administration On Aging. A component of the US DHHS. If that link is dead, look around -- they change the URL of Administration On Aging about as often as the federal administration expires.

AOA
American Optometric Association. Holds its annual congress in June. If you didn't catch that, maybe you need to have your eyes examined.

AOA
American Orthopaedic Association. (Link was unhappy when I visited in February 2005.)

AOA
American Orthopsychiatric Association. ``The American Orthopsychiatric Association (`Ortho') is an 80-year old membership association of mental health professionals concerned with clinical issues and issues of social justice. Ortho provides a common ground for collaborative study, research, and knowledge exchange among individuals from a variety of disciplines engaged in preventive, treatment, and advocacy approaches to mental health.''

AOA
American Osteopathic Association.

AOA
Angle of Arrival. Viz., of a signal approaching an antenna.

AOA
Asociación Odontológica Argentina.

AOA
Association of Otolaryngology Administrators.

AOA
Australian Olive Association. ``By encouraging research and dissemination of information, the Australian Olive Association promotes the sustained development of a national olive industry in Australia. It seeks to support and represent all those involved or interested in the Australian olive industry.''

AOA has its own voluntary extra virgin certification for Australian olive oils (extra virgin explained here). See, however, the AOOA entry.

AOA
Australian Orthopaedic Association.

AOAC
Association of Official Analytical Chemists. (``Official'' in the sense of being involved in government regulatory work. Nowadays members are involved in analytical chemistry for quality control that often has nothing to do with government regulation, and since 1991 the organization's official name has simply been ``AOAC International.'') ``[F]ounded in 1884 as the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists, under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), to adopt uniform methods of analysis for fertilizers.

AOB
Alcohol On Breath.

AOBA
Apartment & Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington. That's metro Washington, DC, not places like Seattle.

AOBA
Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association. (Failing that try this alternate URL.) An NAA affiliate.

AOC
Area Of Concern. Awww... where does it hurt?

AOC
Assimilable Organic Carbon. Waste-water treatment term.

AOC
Award Of Contract.

AOC/AOS
AOC/AOS. I mean -- what else, silly?

In an academic position announcement, I saw ``... AOC/AOS open, but with a preference for a candidate who could teach an undergraduate course in Introductory Logic.'' The AOC/AOS thing seems to be especially popular among philosophy academics. Another position announcement included the following: ``AOS: Philosophy of Mind/Philosophy of Cognitive Science. AOC: Open, but department has needs in Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics, and Epistemology.''

AOCI
Airport Operators Council International.

AOCS
Attitude and Orbit Control System.

AOD
Academy of Operative Dentistry.

AOD
Alcohol and Other Drugs.

AOD
Alcohol OxiDase.

AODME
Association of Osteopathic Directors and Medical Educators.

AOEC
Association of Occupational & Environmental Clinics.

AOF
American Osteopathic Foundation.

AOF
Australian Oilseeds Federation, Inc. An industry group, not a producer. Founded in 1970.

AOFAS
American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society.

AOFAS
Australian Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society. The seal or emblem of the Society shows a bare sole, with a sandal half twisted off, being attacked by bowling pins with eyes (or maybe some striped flatworms) wearing simple scarves.

AOHC
Association of Ontario Health Centres. Self-described as ``the not-for-profit organization of community health centres (CHC), aboriginal health access centres (AHAC), and community health service organizations (CHSO).''

AOI
And-Or-Invert (logic gate). Implements sum-of-products computation of a logic function.

AOI
Arab Organization for Industrialization. A Cairo-based organization established in 1975 to develop and produce weapons for Arab League members. In 1993, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates withdrew their participation, valued at $1.8 billion. In 2003, the Egyptian government is making renewed efforts to get GCC-member support.

AOI
Automatic Optical Inspection (system).

AOK
Allgemeine Ortskrankenkasse. German understood as `General compulsory (District-level) Health insurance scheme.' English capitalization chosen to match initials of the German Abkurzung. The word kasse, evidently from French caisse, means `till, cash register'; krank means `sick,' kranken is `to suffer from,' and kranken- is used in various compounds with the sense of `medical.' Krankenkasse means `health insurance scheme,' and it's not as odd as having ``Social Security Lockbox'' mean whatever it is that it's supposed to mean in US political discourse. Ort has its own entry. Ortskrankenkasse is a `compulsory health insurance scheme (organized at the district level).' Funny how that works.

A-OK
Alles in Ordnung.

AOL
America OnLine. An ISP. Initial set-up uses do-it-our-way proprietary browser software designed to amuse a child. You can use a more professional browser while connected, but some services are available only using AOL browser. Now they own Netscape. Ugh.

Are you the demographic AOL has targeted? New in AOL version 5.0: Horoscope right on your welcome screen!

AOL, with 17 million subscribers as of mid-1999, is by far the largest ISP. Its nearest competitors, Worldnet from AT&T and ailing MSN from Microsoft, have fewer than 2 million. It had been expected that there would be a shake-out, with a few big ISP's dominating, but as of 1999 that hadn't happened. As of July 1999, there were over 6500 North American (US, Canada, Caribbean) ISP's registered with Boardwatch Magazine, most serving just a few hundred dial-up customers in a few area codes.

Cahners In-Stat Group estimated in August 1999 that there were 66 million internet accounts in the US, with AOL's share down from 21.5 to 24.3 in the past year (despite an increase of 5.1 million customers). IDC estimated only 37 million total accounts, with AOL's share dropped to 39.3 from 42.1 and MSN to 4% from 5.9%. Note that the numbers in this paragraph are not consistent with the numbers in the previous paragraph. The internet is changing that fast.

Aolsucks.org now redirects to <aolwatch.org>.

AOM
Acousto-Optic Modulator.

AOM
Aircraft Operating Manual. In ``Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines,'' the German pilot, an old Junker, takes the manual on board his biplane with him, prepared to learn to pilot in real time.

AoM
Association Of Management. See AoM/IAoM.

AoM/IAoM, AOM/IAOM
Association Of Management / International Association Of Management. This is a very useful name. It tells us that the organization is both international and not necessarily international. That is, it is organized at an international level and it may also be organized at a national or regional level. The usual word for describing this special situation is international.

Mmmm, here's something interesting:

``The AoM / IAoM is a bona fide nonprofit professional educational organization with articles of incorporation, constitution & by-laws (1983) and Federal Tax Number. [Dang! Even a Federal Tax Number! And here I thought they were protesting too much.] The lettering, AoM, IAoM, and AoM / IAoM, in both upper and lower cases, are unique to and registered trademarks of the Association of Management and the International Association of Management. Use of said in any manner other than by the Association or an outside reference to any other organization is a violation of Federal Law and will be proscecuted [sic]. Please make a note of it.''

This seems to imply that they regard as illegal the appearance of AoM right here in this glossary, unless what I really mean is AOM -- Alpha & Omega Ministries, or AOM -- Compagnie Aérienne Française (formed in a merger of Minerve and Air Outre Mer). Of course, AOM is unique to the outfit described earlier in this entry, so these other organizations do not exist.

AOML
Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory of the NOAA.

AON
All-Optical (fiber) Network.

AONE
American Organization of Nurse Executives -- ``The Voice of Nursing Leadership.'' Oh, well-contrived! Natural-sounding, too. As long as the Vikings don't want it, you're 1A, completely fit for service! AONE is a subsidiary of the American Hospital Association (AHA).

AOOA
Australian Olive Oil Association, Inc. This organization has a observer status at the IOOC and represents importers of olive oil into Australia. It is authorized by the IOOC to monitor the purity and chemical quality of olive oil sold in Australia. Cf. AOA.

AOPA
Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.

AOQL
Average Outgoing Quality Level. Rather an important consideration in statistical quality control (SQC).

AOR
Album-Oriented Rock. Describes certain FM-radio and few if any AM-radio playlists.

AOR
Atlantic Ocean Region. Designates a range of longitudes for geostationary satellites.

AORBS
Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas. A real trade group for mythical creatures.

``What does it take to be a member of AORBS? Any gentleman, who sports a real beard and has, at least one time, portrayed Santa Claus; whether it was for your own kids on Christmas Day, or whether you are a full time Santa, wearing the red suit for the public. Our members range from who men put on the suit for their grandkids just one night a year, all the way to men who are Santa 24/7 throughout the entire year.'' And here I was thinking that this was the quintessence of seasonal work.

Another paragraph announces ``Santa Gatherings'' (cookies and milk?):
``Santa Claus gathers with hundreds of his Brothers and Descendants, along with their Mrs. Clauses at luncheons across the country. If you are one of those, and you would like to join us, just let us know by clicking [there].'' ``Those'' was apparently not sufficiently inclusive, and starting in 2007 there was a bitter battle for control of AORBS (and its old domain name, which was <aorbsantas.com> until some time after Christmas 2007). A number of competing organizations have sprung up.

AORN
Association of periOperative Registered Nurses. (Capitalization as on hOmepage.)

AOS
Acquisition Of Signal. Moment when orbiter comes within range for radio contact with an earth station. LOS stands for Loss Of Signal.

AOS
American Oriental Society. Founded 1842, which is pretty early. Here's their take on it:

``The American Oriental Society is the oldest learned society in the United States devoted to a particular field of scholarship.''

Hmmm. Interesting qualification. Continuing...

``The Society was founded in 1842, preceded only by such distinguished organizations of general scope as the American Philosophical Society (1743) [APA], the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1780) [AAAS], and the American Antiquarian Society (1812) [AAS]. From the beginning its aims have been humanistic. The encouragement of basic research in the languages and literatures of Asia has always been central in its tradition. This tradition has come to include such subjects as philology, literary criticism, textual criticism, paleography, epigraphy, linguistics, biography, archaeology, and the history of the intellectual and imaginative aspects of Oriental civilizations, especially of philosophy, religion, folklore and art. The scope of the Society's purpose is not limited by temporal boundaries: All sincere students of man and his works in Asia, at whatever period of history are welcomed to membership.''

This must be a ``particular field of scholarship.''

The Journal (JAOS) comes included with membership.

It became a constituent society of the ACLS in 1920. ACLS has an overview.

Also in 1842, Notre Dame University (bordering South Bend, Indiana) was founded, and Edgar Allen Poe more or less invented the detective story or roman policier.

AOS
American Orthodontic Society.

AOS
American Otological Society. What kind of logic is that?

AOS
Area Of Specialization. See AOC/AOS for an example of usage.

AOSM
Air/Ocean Shipboard Measurement.

AOT
Alignment Optical Telescope. NASAnese explained at the IMU entry.

AOTA
American Occupational Therapy Association, Inc.

AOTBE
All Other Things Being Equal. Economists say ``Ceteris paribus.''

AOTBTY
All Of The Best To You. Typical opaque email acronym, undercut by the very fact of its use. I love you, baby, but I don't have the time to type it out.

AOTF
Acousto-Optic Tunable Filter.

AOTF
American Occupational Therapy Foundation.

AOTV
Aeroassisted Orbital Transfer Vehicle.

AOU
American Ornithologists' Union. ``The mission of the American Ornithologists' Union is to advance the scientific understanding of birds, to enrich ornithology as a profession, and to promote a rigorous scientific basis for the conservation of birds.''

a.out
Assembler OUTput. The default filename (in Unix) for the executable code produced by C and C++ compilers.

In the earlier B language from which much of C was derived, the compilation proceeded through a program called bc to an intermediate language, which was in turn converted to assembler source by ba, and a.out was the default filename of the output from the assembler as.

You know, I once heard an ugly rumor that some Fortran compilers were nothing but C compilers with preprocessors that translated Fortran code into C. But that's impossible, because Fortran is so far superior to C. But for one reason or another, the Fortran compilers I used in the late 1980's all spat out executables called a.out.

août
`August' in French.

AoW
Age Of Wonders. A video game. AoW II was released in Summer 2002.

AP
Academic Press.

AP
Academic Psychiatry. A journal published by APPI.

AP
Access Point. Point of internet access. Unnecessarily ambiguous. Prefer POA.

AP
Action Point.

AP
Action Potential.

AP
Adjective or Adjectival Phrase.

AP
Advanced Placement.

AP
Aiming Point (landmark or marking for bombing target). As opposed to impact point (IP).

AP
Alianza Popular. `Popular Alliance.' A far-right political party of Spain led by Manuel Fraga Iribarne. Fraga held various positions in the government of dictator Generalísimo Francisco Franco, including propaganda minister (spelled ministro de Información y Turismo in Spanish) from 1961 to 1969.

Fraga became a minister in the government formed immediately after Franco's death in December 1975. In February 1976, he founded Reforma Democrática. A new constitution called for elections on June 15, 1977; the AP was created to participate in those elections. AP held its first Congreso Nacional in Madrid in March, where Fraga, one of the main organizers, was elected Secretary General. (He resigned that position in November 1979 and became party president at the third national congress in December of that year. But these details are distractions: he was the head of the party by dint of party-members' loyalty, and his nominal position reflected more than created that fact. A similar situation persists today with Deng Xiao-Ping and the Chinese Communist Party.) The AP did poorly in the first two national elections (1977 and 1979), but it merged with a few smaller parties and formed coalitions with a number of other right-of-center parties. In the elections of October 1982, the Coalición Popular (a coalition of AP, Partido Demócrata Popular, and Unión Liberal) became the main parliamentary opposition, with Fraga at its head. (The PDP and UL were headed by Oscar Alzaga and Pedro Schwartz, respectively. It is a common pattern for parliamentary parties to be dominated by personal loyalties to ``charismatic'' leaders.)

Although AP grew to dominance within the conservative opposition, the eighties were not good years for Spanish conservatives as a whole. An abortive coup in February 1981 (led by Colonel Tejero) discredited the military and strengthened the popular judgment that the right was not committed to democracy. Spain was governed by the Socialist Party, with the popular Felipe González as PM.

In late 1986 Fraga began to withdraw from national politics. He was reelected in the national elections of 1986 (of course -- he was first on the AP list), but following disappointing returns more gennerally, he resigned the presidency of the AP and, following his suggestion, the Coalición Popular was effectively dissolved. Antonio Hernández Mancha became party president in February. Fraga resigned from the chamber of deputies (Congreso de Diputados) when he was elected a member of the European Parliament.

Fraga's withdrawal has been widely interpreted as reflecting his perception that his party could not win power without a major image make-over. (One is reminded of the (West) German Socialist Party's renunciation of Marxism in 1956 or 57, regarded as necessary for the party to gain the trust necessary to achieve power. Similarly, in the 1980's, Italy's Communist Party made some noisy protestations of faith in democratic process and some ostentatious criticism of the USSR. Something like that, I forget the details.)

1989 was a pivotal year for Fraga and for the AP. The ninth party congress was held in January, and changed the party's name to Partido Popular (PP, at the entry for which this history is continued). Fraga was reelected party president, but he used the position to select a new successor and continue his withdrawal from national politics. He resigned in September, leaving in place (as interim president) José María Aznar. Instead of running in the general election of October 29, Fraga headed the (victorious) PP ticket for the provincial government of his native Galicia.

AP
A convenient and common abbreviation for Analytic Philosophy. (Particularly convenient and common compared to the more explicit AnalPhil.)

Analytic philosophy has since WWII been the most fashionable flavor of academic philosophy in Britain and North America, and probably elsewhere in the Anglophone world. The other popular flavor has been continental philosophy, dominant in France (there goes the continent). I suppose you could stretch a point and say that anal. phil. is the incontinental philosophy.

What? You want to know something about analytic philosophy itself rather than something about puns based on the term? Boy did you come to the wrong place! Oh, alright: Wittgenstein was probably the most prominent analytic philosopher, until he turned hermit. Analytic philosophy takes the approach that many traditional problems in philosophy inhere in the very wording of the problems themselves, that many philosophical problems are really problems of imprecise or confused semantics. Derrida would have been right at home with this, but he grew up in France, so he invented the deconstruction scam. What an inspired comeback: ``No. You can't mean that. Really. I mean it.''

aP
A convenient and common abbreviation for and Philosophy. (Convenient and common in that entry.)

(By the way, in the AP entry just above, I probably meant both the early and the late Wittgenstein. I hide that comment here because I'm uncertain, but I want to mention this thing somewhere to avoid censure. I don't want to be open to the charge that I neglected to make the distinction, particularly from people who think the distinction is artificial, so it should always be mentioned in order to be condemned as false. Next time I think I'll just comment this stuff out.)

AP
Ante Post (odds).

AP
Anti-Personnel. As in AP bomb or AP mine. AP News is a borderline case, I guess.

AP
Anthropic Principle. See Martin Gardner: ``WAP, SAP, FAP, and PAP,'' New York Review of Books, May 8, 1987. He also defines CRAP.

Ap
APocalypse. An NT book, also clept Revelation, which is in fact the meaning of the Greek word apokálypsis. One hears ``Revelations'' or ``Book of Revelations'' a lot, but in writing, one generally encounters ``Book of Revelation.'' I guess people (other people -- not me) are just more careful in writing. I was trying to track down an old article on that book, and the first thing the reference librarian suggested was broadening the search to include the plural.

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Ap.
Latin, Appius. A praenomen, typically abbreviated when writing the full tria nomina.

AP
Application Process.

AP, Ap, ap
Application Program. Much less common than app.

AP
Arithmetic Progression.

AP
Armed Forces Pacific. Two-letter ``state'' code used by the MPSA and USPS. (For USPS purposes, US Armed Forces stationed out-of-country are served by ``domestic mail,'' and so require a ``state'' code.)

Mail bound for the AP region used to be (and I believe still is) routed through processing centers at San Francisco, and used to be nominally bound for California. Using CA (for California) instead of AP still works for mail. However, it will probably cause problems with credit-card verification. Don't say you weren't warned. For more on MPSA/USPS military mail, see the MPO entry.

AP
Armor-Piercing. Of course, there's armor and there's armor. Bad decisions at the beginning of WWII made American tanks death traps; in that instance we went for quantity instead of quality.

Nowadays, the best armor contains depleted (not very radioactive) uranium.

AP
Array Processor.

AP
Associated Press. A ``[news]wire service.'' Begun during the American Civil War. Competition for scoops and the public appetite for war coverage were such that the Union government shut down newspapers in an attempt to prevent militarily sensitive intelligence from becoming public knowledge. That the war was not going swimmingly was not a relevant motivation, of course not!

The Associated Press Photo Archive has been renamed the AccuNet/AP Multimedia Archive.

This site, from trib.com, no longer has any AP stuff. May do so again later.

A&P
Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. How the mighty are fallen. The grocery store chain was founded by George Hartford in 1859.

AP
Attached Processor.

AP
Audio Precision. A manufacturer of audio testing and measurement equipment.

A/P
AutoPilot.

APA
Adirondack Park Agency.

APA
Administrative Procedure Act.

APA
Airline Passenger Association. I think this may just be the Dallas-based International Airline Passengers Association (IAPA)

APA
Allied Pilots Association.

APA
All Points Addressable.

APA
Ambulatory Pediatric Association.

APA
American Paralysis Association. Now the CRPF.

APA
American Parapsychological Association. Doesn't need a web site. Held its 37th annual convention in Amsterdam in 1994. Apparently this is another one of those organizations with an expansive definition of ``American.''

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APA
American Philological Association.

``Founded in 1869, the American Philological Association (APA) is the principal learned society for classical studies in North America. Its membership is composed primarily of university and college teachers of classical studies in North America. Its members also include many preparatory school teachers as well as members from outside the United States and Canada.''

If you don't know what philology is by now, shame on you!

So anyway back to the APA. Early on, the APA had sections that subsumed philology in the older general sense, and that did so for various languages -- e.g., Germanic philology (i.e. German, English, and related literary criticism, linguistics, prosody, etc.). Today the APA is focused principally on the study (and teaching) of Latin, classical Greek, and literature in those languages. The other branches of what used to be general philology peeled away and formed their own groups, like the MLA. One of the original founders of the SBF (and a member in good standing of the Alpha chapter), John Peradotto, discussed the evolution of philology as a disciplinary category among other issues in ``Texts and Unrefracted Facts: Philology, Hermeneutics and Semiotics,'' an article published in Arethusa vol. 16 (1983) and republished in on pp. 179-198 of Classics : A Discipline and Profession in Crisis? That volume was edited by Phyllis Culham and Lowell Edmunds (Lanham, Mass. and London: University Press of America, 1989).

For more history of the APA, see

  1. Herbert W. Benario: ``The APA as a North American Organization,'' pp. 285-93, op. cit.
  2. E. Sihler: ``Klassische Studien und klassischer Unterricht in den Vereinigten Staaten,'' Neue Jahrbuch für das klassische Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche Literatur und für Pädagogik [a.a.h.i.h.l.n.o.o.] vol. 10 (1902) pp. 458-63, 503-16, 548-56.
  3. F. G. Moore: ``A History of the American Philological Association,'' TAPA vol. 50 (1919) pp. 5-32.
  4. L. R. Shero: The American Philological Association: An Historical Sketch (Philadelphia, 1964).
  5. W. M. Calder III: ``Die Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in den Vereinigten Staaten,'' Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien vol. 11 (1966) pp. 213-40 [also appeared in Studies in the Modern History of Classical Scholarship (Naples, 1984), pp. 15-42.

The 1997 annual meeting was 27-30 December, Chicago. The program is up.

There were some delays in 1997 business, associated with a move of the headquarters to New York University (NYU). Their new office numbers are (212) 998-3575; fax (212) 995-4814. Email american.philological@nyu.edu

The Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) decided not too long ago that there was no longer any need for a philology entry. In 1995, the company was sold. Don't let this happen to you. [For a prehistory of EB's decision, see John Peradotto: Man in the Middle Voice (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1990), p. 5.]

Annual APA meetings are held jointly with the AIA, in late December until 1999 (Dallas, TX) and in January from 2001 (San Diego, CA) on. In 2002, the meeting is in Philadelphia, Jan. 3-6. See you there.

[The information on Jakobson in this entry comes from Richard Bradford's Roman Jakobson : Life, language, art (Routledge, 1994).]

APA
American Philosophical Association. Investigate empirically the epistemics of ``visiting'' their homepage. Not to be confused with American Philological Association supra.

Founded, you may believe, in 1900, a constituent society of the ACLS since 1920, the same year that Ponzi's famous scheme collapsed (vide IRC). ACLS has an overview (of the APA).

A good starting point to learn about philosophy on the net is the University of Chicago Philosophy Project.

APA
American Planning Association. I, um, I had planned to, uh-- I'll have some more information about this, uh, soon.

APA
American Plywood Association. According to a thumbnail history at its website, ``APA is a nonprofit trade association that has grown and evolved with the engineered wood industry. APA was founded in 1933 as the Douglas Fir Plywood Association, and was later recognized as the American Plywood Association. In 1994, APA changed its name to APA -- The Engineered Wood Association to better reflect the range of products manufactured by APA members and the international scope of the Association.''

APA
American Podiatry Association. Now the APMA.

APA
American Press Association. Apparently a nonexistent organization, the name on bogus press ID. Sort of like mail-order doctorates of divinity. See this product.

A front-page story in the New York Times, July 28, 1999, described private agents who posed as journalists -- to obtain confidential information and to plant false information on legitimate journalists. According to that article, people actually use those APA cards. There's a news source born every minute. Just between you and me, though: you wouldn't think you'd need subterfuge to obtain information that someone would willingly tell a reporter.

APA
American Psychiatric Association.

That's all I'm going to say about the country's principal psychiatric association. Does that bother you? Why?

APA
American Psychological Association. In the race for hot domain names, this was the APA that got to ``apa.org'' first.

In 1875, William James at Harvard and Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig independently set up the first demonstration laboratories in psychology. In 1879, Wundt established the first research laboratory in psychology. This certainly appears to be an inversion of the natural order. Evidently, there were psychological facts one needed a laboratory to teach, but not to learn. Or maybe not. The year 1879 is widely regarded as marking the birth of psychology as a separate discipline. Wundt (1832-1920) is credited with midwifing this child of philosophy and physiology. Nowadays, we call this interdisciplinarity. The Greeks called such a transgenic creation a hippogriff or a monster, like the Minotaur.

A sexual organism, however first generated, may be a species if it can reproduce true. An interdisciplinary program can become a separate discipline if it can complete the vicious circle of professors turning out graduate students and graduate students becoming professors. Wilhelm Wundt was a fecund generator of research product, held responsible for an estimated 54,000 article and book pages' worth of lost cellulose souls. (In 1881, Wundt founded the first psychology research journal.) He had a large number of graduate students. The United States was fertile ground for transplanting the new species, and between 1883 and 1893, twenty-three new psychological research laboratories were created at US universities. (This statement makes it seem more gradual than it was in fact. In 1883, Wundt's student G. Stanley Hall founded the first American psychology research lab at Johns Hopkins University. No new labs were created until 1888, when a surge began:


YEAR  New labs
1888: 3
1889: 2
1890: 3
1891: 3
1892: 8
1893: 3

About half of these were founded by students of Wundt or Hall.

In 1892, G. Stanley Hall (1846-1924) was the driving force to establish the APA, and was elected its first president. In 1892, it counted twenty-seven members. In 1892, it counted, less precisely, about 100,000.

Since 1973, the APA has been a constituent society of the ACLS. ACLS has an overview.

APA
Antarctic Protected Area. A system that has been discussed; I'm not sure if it was ever implemented.

APA
Asociación Peruana (.pe) de Astronomia. (URL gone.)

APA
Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina. Argentina is a bit of a special case: potentially, there's plenty of work to be had, but there are so few local models of sane behavior that people think normality is sane. That's flip but true; the following is also true. During the Dirty War, a large fraction of the country's psychologists and psychiatrists fled or disappeared. Afterwards, people with very different preparation came into the field to fill the gap, including the literally crying need for grief counseling and help addressing enormous guilt feelings of various kinds. Other people were changing their line of work then, too. In 1979, some of our friends were taking aerobics classes from a former torturer. She still had burn scars from when she tried to commit suicide.

APA
Audio Publishers Association. ``Spoken Audio.'' Books on tape vel sim.

APA
Austria Presse Agentur.

APACVS
Association of Physician Assistants in CardioVascular Surgery.

APAG
Atlantic Policy Advisory Group. (NATO acronym.)

A.P.A.G.E.S.M.S.
Association des Parents et Amis Gestionnaires d'Établissements Sociaux et Médicaux Sociaux. ``L'APAGESMS, ... située sur le département de la Charente-Maritime, a pour but de contribuer à la politique sociale en faveur des personnes handicapées [that's French? oh yeah: I see an accent] mentales par la création et la gestion de plusieurs structures.''

APALA
Asian/PAcific Librarians Association. It was founded in 1980, ``incorporated in Illinois in 1981, and formally affiliated with the American Library Association (ALA) in 1982. A predecessor of APALA, the Asian American Librarians Caucus (AALC), was organized in 1975 as a discussion group of the ALA Office for Library Outreach Services....''

APAR
Active Phased-Array Radar.

APAR
Authorized Program Analysis Report.

apatite
Ca5(PO4)3(OH). Defines hardness 5 on Friedrich Mohs's mineral hardness scale.

APB
All Points Bulletin. At least, that's what everyone figures it means.

[Football icon]

APB
All-Purpose (football running) Back. Someone who can play both at both fullback and tailback (halfback) positions. See running back for clarification.

APB
AntiPhase Boundary.

APBA
American Power Boat Association. Sounds like a cross between All Points Bulletin (APB) and Police Benevolent Association (PBA). Vide goracing.com, VROOM.

APC
Academic Programs Committee.

APC
Advanced Process Control.

APC
Alberta Printed Circuits, Ltd. They manufacture PCB's. They have an informative homepage.

APC
American Power Conversion.

APC
Angled Physical Contact (connectors).

APC
Antigen-Presenting Cell. A cell that processes and presents an antigen on its surface for recognition by T lymphocytes.

APC, A.P.C.
Armored Personnel Carrier.

APC
Aspirin, Phenacetin, and Caffeine.

APC
Association for Progressive Communications. A ``global computer network'' dedicated to serving NGO's for ``social justice and development.'' It also has a Spanish name: La Asociación para el Progreso de las Comunicaciones. This means `Association for the Progress of Communications,' but the initialism comes out in the right order, so it's okay.

AP-CAP
Asia-Pacific Computing And Philosophy conference. (Coordinated with IACAP.) The first AP-CAP was at the Australian National University in November 2003. It was deemed highly successful, but whether that was the conclusion of a numerical simulation or an argument from first principles is not clear. It certainly can't have been a conclusion from vulgar empirical observation. On whatever grounds, however unsteady, it was decided to hold an encore, the second AP-CAP, January 7-9, 2005, at Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok, Thailand).

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ap. crit.
Latin, `apparatus criticus.' Standardized system of footnotes indicating alternate readings and various information about extant texts, necessary in the business of classical philology (vide APA), which needs to reconstruct texts from various flawed intermediate sources.

Stefan Hagel (his email address is, or was, a8601887 followed by a single-character symbol, and then unet.univie.ac.at) has written a ``Classical Text Editor'' (also in English) with special facilities for the ap. crit., displayed in a separate window. An example illustrates critical apparati. (Single upper-case Latin and Greek letters typically refer to particular source manuscripts available. The rest, figure out yourself. Line numbering of classical texts may be unnecessarily confusing when there are multiple standard critical editions.)

APCUG
Association of PC User Groups.

APCVD
Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD).

APD
Avalanche PhotoDiode. [Vide F. Capasso, et al., IEEE TED, 40, 381 (1983).]

APDA
American Parkinson Disease Association.

APDA
American Parliamentary Debate Association. This organization came into existence by assumption, or perhaps presumption. Read about it here. We have other debating entries. There are arguments both for and against visiting them.

APDIM
Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine. Founded in 1977. As of 2005, individual and institutional members altogether represent ``95% of the accredited residency programs in internal medicine within the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada.'' The association has ``[amended] its bylaws to allow programs from outside the United States and Canada to join as members.'' APDIM is part of AAIM.

APDR
Association of Program Directors in Radiology. Well gee, the AUR gives them a link right at the top of their homepage, you'd think they could return the favor. Nope, typical administrators. Cf. A3CR2.

APDT
Association of Pet Dog Trainers.

APDU
Application Protocol Data Unit.

APE
Annealed Proton Exchange.

APEAC
Ask, Praise, Encourage, Advise, Check. What is this, a new-age cult?

APEC
Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation. Begun as an informal discussion group, it was established in 1989 as a formal discussion group. At some point when I wasn't paying any attention (possibly initially), it was promoted to a ``forum.'' In alphabetical order of some sort, its members are Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, (South) Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Aotearoa-New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Thailand and the USA. (Italicized country names are those of the charter members.) As of 2001, APEC had three more members, one of them Russia.

The Manila People's Forum on APEC 1996 contains some interesting analysis.

``Chinese Taipei'' (it's Taibei with the Romanization now standard in the PRC) is Taiwan, of course, but the designation was an attempt to skirt the sovereignty issue. At a meeting in October 2001 dominated by a war against terrorism, there was a dispute between meeting host PRC and Taiwan over Taiwan's choice of envoy.

The APEC Secretariat has a Singapore URL. At APEC's US home page, I was amused by the quotation marks. The word economy also finesses the sovereignty issue. Those diplomats are such geniuses: they can produce the facsimile of progress and comity from any stew. Too bad if they can't produce the genuine article, or if the dissembling is ultimately counterproductive.

The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum is the primary international organization for promoting trade and economic cooperation among 21 member `economies' around the Pacific Rim.

What about Tibet?

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APEC
Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Clássicos. I can't imagine what this means, but I've seen a sort of ``Rosetta Stone'' for this, bearing the inscription Association Portugaise d'Études Classiques. I'm pretty lost there, but perhaps this will help you figure it out.

APEIA
Agrupación por el Esclarecimiento de la Masacre Impune de la AMIA. Spanish, loosely, `group [agitating] for the revelation of the unpunished [perpetrators and accessories] of the AMIA massacre.'

aperçu, apercu
Ahn eensaightfool observah syown, orrr, ah seen-op-cease.

APFTQ
L'Association des producteurs de films et de télévision du Québec. `The Association of Television and Film Producers of Quebec.' Some of our sharper-eyed readers have noticed that the order of film and television is reversed in the English translation. All I can tell you for certain is, it wasn't my idea.

APG
Aberdeen (weapon) Proving Ground.

APGA
Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni.

Apgar score
A quick-and-dirty measure of the physical health of a newborn infant computed from a few obvious physiological indicators.

A baby is typically scored by delivery room personnel at one and five minutes of age. The Apgar score is the sum of the scores for five indicators, scored as follows:

Indicator Score
0 1 2
Appearance Pale  Blue  Pink 
Pulse Absent  <100 beats/min.  >100 beats/min. 
Grimace Absent  Grimace  Cry Active 
Activity Limp  Some tone  Active 
Respiration Absent  Irregular  Regular or Crying 

It is politically incorrect in the extreme to suggest that the initials of the indicators have anything to do with the name of the score. Spelling Apgar in all-caps qualifies you as a running dog of the oppressor class. In fact, this wonderful scoring system was developed by and eventually named after Dr. Virginia Apgar (1909-74), a humorless neonatology pioneer.

The Apgar score is obviously a rather nonlinear measure: one point for breathing at all, another whole point for breathing regularly; one point for having any pulse at all, another point for being over 100. The SBF neonate score is even simpler, and approximately equals the Apgar score on average:

  Score
0 5 10
Indication Dead  Sick  Hale 

You know the old saying -- a baby in the arms is worth two in the Neonate ICU. In other words, a pink (2), active (2), grimacing (1) baby that isn't breathing (0) and has no pulse (0) (total 5) is healthier than an irregularly breathing (1), pale (0), grimacing (1), lethargic (1) baby with a pulse of 90 (1) (total 4). The basic reason....

Hmmm -- forgot what I was going to write there. Oh yeah -- nothing important. You know, Francis Albert Sinatra was a large baby (13.5 lb.) and a difficult birth, requiring a physician to extract him with forceps and permanently scarring his head. The doctor thought he was stillborn, and left him on the kitchen table to attend the endangered mother. The grandmother, a midwife, grabbed the baby and held him under the (cold) water tap. Only then did Frank Sinatra first wail -- Dec. 12, 1915. (Okay, he was more of a crooner. I think this character demands artistic license.)

A study in the October 2006 issue of the Journal of Pediatrics claimed poor interobserver reliability. The study compared Apgar scores assigned by delivery-room staff and by obstetric staff who viewed ten-second clips taken at five minutes. The Apgar scores assigned in the delivery room were higher than those assigned by those who watched the video by an average of 2.4 points. (Pulse in all cases was assigned on the basis of pulse oximetry, so only four elements of the Apgar score were under effective review.) On its face, this seems to demonstrate only the limitations of video diagnosis.

APGO
Association of Professors of Gynecology and Obstetrics.

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APGRD
Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama.

APH
American Printing House for the Blind.

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APh
L'Année Philologique. A listing of the year's published classical scholarship. It is the standard citation index for work in classical antiquity, and its journal-title abbreviations (over 1300 of them) are the de facto standard ones for journals in this field.

Here is one list of the abbreviations, served by the ``Cybrary'' at the University of Queensland. Those who are revolted by such ugly neologisms, and who fear further on-line assaults, can use this other listing.

L'APh was originally distributed on paper, and there was a period beginning in the 1990's when it was on CD-ROM, with both individual and institutional licenses available; around 2000 they went online. Use of the online version was free of charge, gratis, until April 28, 2002. After that date, access was restricted to subscribers. Individual accounts were 45 EUR per year and institutional rates varied by the number of simultaneous connections from 200 EUR to 765 EUR per year for a site license. Those rates might still be in effect, but I'm too lazy to stay up-to-date.

You might wonder, if it's now on line, why one need bother looking up the abbreviations elsewhere. The reason is that the APh interface is terrible. It's slow and unintuitive (play ``find-the-link-anchor,'' watch the text realign, resize windows as necessary), and the website provides a list of APh's own abbreviations appearing in the search results, no one seems to know of it. The answer to all complaints about APh is that it's poor because APh is poor(ly funded). That's presumably why it's late also, but they've been catching up a little bit. (For speed, convenience, and coverage that's more up-to-date, and if you won't be inconvenienced by coverage that is spotty before about 1980, I recommend the ISI Web of Knowledge.)

In June 2005, APh Volume 74 (2003) was up. I haven't been keeping close tabs, but fwiw...
As of March 2002, Volume 71 (2000) was expected ``soon.''
Volume 70 (1999) was available in October 2001.
Volume 66 (1995) appeared in early 1998.
[Volume 66 is the first volume to have been compiled entirely electronically and it was ready for publication before vol. 65, which was compiled in the old manner on printed slips and was still in pageproof when I entered this information in 1998. Volume 66 is smaller than 64 because of an artificial time frame (a once-only nominal year) of 18 months to compile the data.]

Bibliographies for volumes 67 and 68 (1996-7) were available at the old website from Oct. 25, 1999. Subsequently, bibliographies have been available on the web before the print volumes appeared.

APh is the featured resource in the DCB.

aph.
APHetic. See aphetic form.

APHA
American Public Health Association.

aphaeresis
Older form, more common in Commonwealth English, of apheresis.

aphelion
Point of the furthest orbital separation (apoapsis) between a planet (or other solar orbiter) and sun. If not otherwise specified, you can usually assume that the planet is earth.

apheresis
Elision of a sound or sounds from the beginning of a word. The addition of a sound or sounds at the beginning of a word is prosthesis. I love it. Elision from the end is apocope. A special case of apheresis, now often mistaken for the general case, is aphesis. See apheretic form for more.

apheresis
Elision of a sound or sounds from the beginning of a word. The addition of a sound or sounds at the beginning of a word is prosthesis. I love it. Elision from the end is apocope. A special case of apheresis, now often mistaken for the general case, is aphesis.

The term apheresis is apparently used for the bald phenomenon (loss of initial sound or sounds) regardless of cause or intention. Thus on the one hand, it is now used primarily for a process studied in historical linguistics: a gradual erosion of a word over long periods of time. This process is at least partly unconscious: the beginnings of apharesis may be in careless or rapid speech; over time, however, some new speakers will learn the apheretic pronunciation and be unaware of the earlier long form. (``Till'' as an apheretic form of ``until'' is probably one of the exceptional cases, where the long form remained common in parallel with the rise of the short form.)

On the other hand, apheresis once referred primarily to the same change of sound used as a figure of speech. It might be used in prose as an imitation of natural or uneducated speech; it might be used stylistically in the coining of names and in music lyrics or poetry in order to make a line scan or for other aesthetic purposes.

The two kinds of apheresis described above -- regular phonological process and figure of speech -- are the source of most examples of apheresis given in dictionary definitions of the word. (Now primarily the first, of course.)

The term has also been applied to instances in Hebrew where an initial aleph without a vowel is dropped. (This is kind of tricky: the plosive consonant represented by aleph is difficult to pronounce without a vowel, but in some dialects or at least idiolects it is not pronounced even with a vowel. I'll try to learn more about this and describe it either here or at the future entry for the Hawaiian spelling of Western names that begin with a vowel.) Apheresis can also arise from false analysis, as in the process that yielded the new word adder (q.v.) from the earlier nadder.

There's more on the linguistic senses at the next entry (apheretic form). The word apheresis has also been used in medical senses since the seventeenth century, first for surgical extraction (the word fits nicely with prosthesis) and later for the removal of a quantity of blood. Since the 1990's, apheresis has processes in which blood is removed, filtered, and returned to the same body. The filtering may be to extract something useful (platelets from the blood of donors, say) or to cleanse the blood (of LDL's say).

apheretic form
A word like 'tween derived by elision of initial sounds (a process called apheresis). The part removed is usually an initial unaccented syllable.

(Sometimes this pattern -- whole first syllable removed -- is made part of the definition of apheretic form, but you should ignore such restrictive definitions. The restriction is inconvenient for various reasons. For one, sometimes a fragment of the initial syllable is left, and what would you call that? Worse: syllabification is an imprecise science in English, so the narrowed definition gets snagged at occasionally rough syllable boundaries. The restriction may reflect lack of imagination on the part of the definer, and seems to be generally ignored. A more charitable explanation might be that the restriction carries over the old sense of apharesis from ancient Greek and Latin poetry, in which it does generally mean elision of one or more initial syllables.)

Sometimes, as in words like wrought and writhe, the apheresis leads to ``silent letters'' and is not indicated orthographically. If there is an apheretic form in these cases, then it is a form of pronunciation. For other examples, see aphetic form (a special case of apheretic form).

aphesis
A term coined (along with aphetic form) by J.A.H. Murray, editor of the OED, and published in the Transactions of the Philological Society, vol. 175 in 1880. The term was originally intended to name gradual and unintentional loss of a short unaccented vowel at the beginning of a word. (For examples, see aphetic form.) In other words it was a special case of the more general apheresis, a special name being deemed useful on account of its particular frequency in English. By the 1930's, the term had become popular but its sense had expanded. Some included the apheresis of any single sound, whether an unstressed vowel or not. Examples include the loss of the k sound in knife or the w sound in write.

The notion of a ``single sound'' is not always straightforward. For example, the first syllable of ``until'' is simply a syllabic n (/N/) in some pronunciations. It might be splitting hairs to argue whether this Ntil is a variant, making ``till'' an instance of aphesis, or an aphetic form of until, making ``till'' strictly only an apheretic form of until.

Some have willy-nilly applied the new term aphesis to any instance of apheresis. But despite the kind of exception mentioned in the preceding paragraph, a distinction is usually possible. Thoughtful people like you, dear reader, want to stay on the side of the angels and preserve a useful distinction, so you will of course not call just any apheresis an aphesis.

The question remains whether to maintain the original sense or use the expanded any-single-sound definition. I would urge the former definition, because the broader definition presents difficulties. For example, words with initial kn, such as knave, knife, knight, etc., may be instances of apheresis only, aphesis in the slightly broad sense, or something else. (If the conventional kn represents a k'n with a short shwa, then ``loss of the k sound'' is really loss of an initial syllable -- apheresis only. On the other hand, it is very difficult to produce a consonant cluster with both voiced and unvoiced consonants, particularly if these are articulated at different parts of the mouth. So if kn was a true consonant cluster, then the n was probably articulated palatally, like ng, rather than in the normal alveolar position, and we have not only loss of one initial sound but transformation of the second.) The entire notion of what constitutes a single sound is problematic -- many sounds regarded as single consonants or long vowels are transcribed phonetically as pairs of sounds. If we only count short vowels for aphesis, and allow (as is traditional) more than a single nominal ``sound'' for apheresis, then these counting problems are avoided. Now march!

aphetic form
A word like 'gainst derived (as from against, in this example) by elision of an initial short unstressed vowel sound. Other examples: 'tention for attention, 'tis for it is. The apostrophe is often used in eye dialect to indicate aphetic forms that are considered nonstandard usage, just as in contracted forms like shouldn't've. Some aphetic forms become normative, in which case any apostrophe mark is omitted. (Not so contracted forms like shouldn't, you've, and o'clock.)

The ordinary adverb down, for example, is an aphetic form of an Old English word that, though now rare, has survived as the word now written adown. The English word bishop, like its cognates in most Romance and apparently all extant Germanic languages, is missing the initial vowel of the Latin etymon episcopus (< Gk. epískopos). The Spanish is obispo, but bispo is among the earliest recorded instances; it's not clear to me that obispo is not a later development from the aphetic form.

As explained in the aphesis entry, the sense of the term has expanded in uncouth usage, but for longer or consonantal initial elided forms, you can use the term apheretic form. For a closely related phenomenon, see the adder.

aphid
Common name for a small delicate insect with a sucking mouth -- Class Insecta, Order Homoptera. The economic significance and ecological niche of this kind of insect is easily understood from another common name: plant louse. (Like the louse, the main problem with aphids is not the damage they do directly by sucking, but the viral plant diseases they spread.)

The English word aphid was coined by mistaken back-formation of aphides, plural of the Latin and for a time the common English word for the insect: aphis. Aphids are typically about 1/16 of an inch long, so it is not surprising that the original singular form was eclipsed. [Another word created by misconstrual of a plural is phase. English adopted the Latin phasis; in the nineteenth century the plural (i.e., the Latin nominative plural) phases occurred more frequently, and phase arose by back-formation. In this case, however, many would have been aware of the French word phase (plural phases). In French and other Romance languages, of course, the the singular -se form is a natural development from the ablative or accusative singular forms. More about that at the pea entry.]

The formal English common names of aphid species use the form aphis. For example, there are the beet aphis, birch aphis, cabbage aphis, corn-root aphis, currant aphis, lettuce aphis, melon aphis (also affects squash and watermelon), oleander aphis, pea aphis (also affects bamboo; have you visited the pea entry yet?), spinach aphis (also affects green peaches -- but who eats green peaches?), squash aphis (had enough?), and woolly apple aphis. (The woolly apple aphid attacks the roots of unwoolly apple trees.)

APHIS
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Part of the USDA. Has to make various decisions that gore someone's ox, occasionally literally, and which are consequently often controversial.

Have you visited our aphid entry yet? Nooooo!?!? You're missing out on a delicious irony!

aphorism
Francis Bacon was a great fan of aphorisms. If you want a thoughtful analysis of what aphorisms are or should be, and why they're 40% better than maxims (I just made that up), see chapter 3 (``The Aphorism'') of Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose by Brian Vickers (CUP, 1968), pp. 60-95.

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APHRODITE
Aircraft Parameters Handled in Real time Over Data link to Improve Trajectory Estimation. A system that was venerable a couple of thousand years before it was implemented.

APHSA
American Public Human Services Association. Founded in 1930 as APWA.

API
Academic Performance Index. A rating of California school districts, based on scores of students on a uniform test.

API
American Paper Institute.

API
American Petroleum Institute.

API
Application Program[ming] Interface. Productive suffix: EHLLAPI, GAPI, HLLAPI, IDAPI, MAPI, ODAPI, SAPI.

Plain old ``API'' may refer to that of Microsoft Windows.

API
Applied Precision Inc.

API
Association of Professional Italianists//Associazione Professori d'Italiano. The Italian part of the name means `association of professors of Italian.' ``[E]stablished in 1981 ... to promote cultural exchanges and discussions on didactic and literary topics concerning the preservation and teaching of the Italian language and literature in Southern Africa both at school and university level, and to keep abreast with [sic] international developments in this field.''

APIC
Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller. An interrupt controller architecture commonly found on 32-bit PC systems based on an Intel architecture. APIC architecture supports multiprocessor interrupt management (with symmetric interrupt distribution across all processors), multiple I/O subsystems, 8259A compatibility, and inter-processor interrupts. Cf. SAPIC.

APIC
Africa Policy Information Center. Since 1978. The educational affiliate of WOA.

APIC
Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc.

APICS, A.P.I.C.S.
American Production and Inventory Control Society. Now styles itself ``APICS -- The Educational Society for Resource Management.''

APIS
Advanced Papyrological Information System. A database of information on papyrus on digital media. Got that? ``APIS links together in a single environment various sources of information about texts written on papyrus and the society that produced them.''

APIS
Antarctic Pack-Ice Seals. An SCAR program.

APIUM
Association for the Protection and Integrity of an Unspoiled Mars. Title of a short SciFi story by Brian W. Aldiss. It was apparently first published as the final chapter of a speculative but otherwise putatively nonfiction collection, Humanism and the Humanities in the Twenty-first Century, edited by William S. Haney II and Peter Malekin (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Pr., and London: Associated Univ. Presses; like, sure, we all know what state Lewisburg is in; 2001). CIP: LC number B821.H659  2001, ISBN 0-8387-5497-X.

ApJ
AstroPhysical Journal. Cf. AJ.

APL
Accreditation of Prior Learning.

APL
Applied Physics Letters. The letters journal that goes along with the Journal of Applied Physics, (JAP), like the PRL that goes with the Physical Review.

There's been an evolution in the sense of the word ``letter'' in this context. Originally, ``letters'' were a regular part of physics journals, just as they are of nonscholarly magazines. These letters were occasionally brief reports or urgent first reports of original research, but more often were comments about previously published articles. (Letters sections of medical journals still seem to have that sort of mix.)

In physics journals, the brief-report component of letters sections grew, eventually being spun off as separate journals of short articles reporting work that requires rapid dissemination. The letters journals were typically published more frequently and offered faster publication. The time between issues is small compared to the time from submission to publication, and most of the delay comes in the wait for reviews to come back. Hence, letters journals do not offer substantially faster publication. (In reality, physicists also try to publish in letters journals because of their higher prestige.)

Letters specifically commenting on articles previously in a journal, and not themselves describing substantial research, continue to be published in small numbers in what are now called Comments sections. Some journals also have brief-report sections, for articles that are as short as the articles in letters journals, but which do not claim to be important enough to merit the supposed more rapid publication.

APL
A Programming Language. A language with many single-character array operators (one of which is described at the APL\360 entry). There's a SIG for APL and related J, as well as a Usenet FAQ. A good resource is Jim Weigang's APL Information pages.

APL was originally developed by Ken Iverson of Harvard University and IBM, in 1962.

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes source code for three simple APL programs.

APLAC
Analysis Program for Linear Active Circuits. An analog-circuit simulator and design tool. (Has extensively informative homepage.) Developed by professor Martti Valtonen in the Circuit Theory Laboratory of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) in Finland (.fi).

APLAC
Asia Pacific Laboratory Accreditation Conference.

APLL
Analog Phase-Locked Loop.

APLMF
Asia Pacific Legal Metrology Forum.

I haven't checked, but I suppose this is an organization for people who measure laws. There are many metrics, although units of force (buoyant force) and word counts are a good start.

APL\360
A Programming Language for the IBM 360. This was the first implementation of APL as an actual computer programming language (previously APL had been implemented, or used or whatever, as a means of having something to write computer science articles about).

The backslash in the name APL\360 was a cutesy joke, or else a demonstration of the power of the language. Actually both: it demonstrated the utility of the language. APL has its own distinctive character set, and the first time I saw a manual for it I thought it must have been invented to sell exotic keyboards, but it turns out that you just use a normal keyboard and a composition key.

Anyway, one of the characters that has a special meaning, but which is found in ordinary character sets, is the backslash (\), representing a binary ``expands'' operator. Hence, ``APL\360'' is supposed to be read as ``APL expands [the conveniently available functionality of] [the IBM] 360.''

FWIW, ``expands'' takes a template as its first operand and an n-dimensional array to be expanded as its second. The template is a one-dimensional boolean array. For each successive 1 in the template, the expanded array gets the next element (n-1-dimensional subarray, if n>1). For each 0 in the template, the expanded array gets a 0 (or subarray of 0's). For example,

      1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 \ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
produces
      1 2 3 0 4 5 6 7 0 8 9

If the array to be expanded is character-valued, spaces (instead of zeroes) are inserted in the same way. I don't know what the APL interpreter does if the sum of the template elements is greater than the length of the array, but a real programmer would want it to do something other than complain. Ideally something brutal.

APM
Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine. ``The Organization for Consultation and Liaison Psychiatry.''

APM
Acoustic Plate Mode. Nothing to do with WBGMB.

APM
Advanced Power Management.

APM
Asociación Psicoanalítica Mexicana.

APM
Association of Professors of Medicine. It's ``the national organization of departments of internal medicine at the US medical schools and numerous affiliated teaching hospitals as represented by chairs and appointed leaders.'' APM is part of AAIM.

APM
Atmospheric Passivation Module.

APMA
American Podiatric Medical Association. Formerly the APA.

APMMF
Asia-Pacific Mission for Migrant Filipinos.

AP-MOVPE, APMOVPE
Atmospheric-Pressure Metal-Organic Vapor-Phase Epitaxy.

APMP
Asia Pacific Metrology Programme. A regional organization for measurement standards. (``Asia Pacific'' includes Pakistan.)

APMR
Association of Preventive Medicine Residents. A temporary membership class of the ACPM.

APMS
Automated Performance Measurement System.

APMT
Association of Professional Music Therapists. ``The Association of Professional Music Therapists is a professional organization involved in supporting and developing the profession. The Association maintains a register of Music Therapists who hold a recognized qualification.'' Its old URL (at apmt.org.uk) is now held by a company that's selling music there and will entertain offers for the domain name.

APN
Alliance for Psychosocial Nursing. To judge from the only website that seems to be available for it, the organization's main activity is publishing its official journal: Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services.

APN
Americans for Peace Now. Fifth columnists in the war known as The Peace Process.

APNIC
Asia Pacific Network Information Centre. ``[T]he non-profit Internet Registry organisation for the Asia Pacific region.''

APO
Alpha Phi Omega fraternity. ``The purpose of this fraternity is to assemble college students in a national service fraternity in the fellowship of principles derived from the Scout Oath and Law of the Boy Scouts of America; to develop leadership, to promote friendship and to provide service to humanity; and to further freedom that is our national, educational and intellectual heritage.''

They like to summarize their mission with the words ``Leadership, Friendship, and Service.'' Since philia and ophelos mean `friendship' and `help' in Ancient Greek, I imagine that those are the words the Greek letters phi and omega of the name represent. The alpha might stand for something related to archon (which could be translated `leader'). Don't complain about the speculativeness; this is more about the Greek than you can get from the fraternity's own webpages.

Apparently Shakespeare was the first to use Ophelia as a given name. He was a little bit less successful with his flesh-and-blood children. He named his only son ``Hamnet,'' and that doesn't seem to have caught on.

APO
Amorphous PolyOlefin.

APO
Army Post Office. A ``city'' code for USPS mail outside the US and Canada. For details of how this works, see the MPO entry. (For the obvious historical reasons (see USAAF), APO serves for army and air force installations.)

APO
Association of Philippine Orthodontists.

apoapsis
Greatest separation of two orbiting bodies. (Nearest approach is periapsis.) Special cases are aphelion and apogee.

apocarp
A fruit having separated carpels (simple pistils). Trust me, you can find this in the Scrabble forest.

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APOCRA
APOCRyphA. Edited pour la Association pour l'étude de la littérature apocryphe chrétienne, it ``is focused on the treasures of material borne through literature and other expressions of the imagination over two millennia. This material was generated, cultivated and transmitted by numerous Jewish communities and a range of Christian communities throughout Asia, Africa and Europe.''

Only 46 euros for the one annual issue -- a bargain, a fire sale, compared to some of the other scholarly rags published by Brepols.

apocope
Elision of a sound or sounds from the end of a word. Examples in English include ``cup o'tea'' and ``back an' forth.'' Aphaeresis is to apocope and elision as prefix is to suffix and affix.

apocynthion
The highest-altitude point in a lunar orbit, or the altitude at that point. Cf. pericynthion.

The first manned spacecraft to orbit the Moon was Apollo 8. When it went behind the Moon on Christmas Eve, 1968, it was on a free-return orbit: without a firing of its rockets, it would whip around the Moon and return to Earth. The service-module rockets were fired for four and a half minutes, and then the command-module instrument panel had numbers in certain readouts that had been blank. One was ``Delta V'' (change of velocity magnitude): -2800. (That's in feet per second, okay? Metric probably doesn't work in outer space.) Another was the computed apocynthion: 169.1 mi. When you have a finite apocynthion, you're in lunar orbit. The pericynthion value was 60.5 miles. (Over the next day, the orbit was trimmed to a fairly circular one at an altitude of 60 miles.)

APOD
Astronomy Picture of the Day.

apodictic
Provably true, or thought so anyway.

ApoE4
Fourth numbered phenotype of the gene Apolipoprotein E. Reported in late March (oh great, I forgot to write down the year) New England Journal of Medicine by Eric Reiman et al.: homozygous ApoE4's with family history but no symptoms have brain PET scans showing low-activity regions similar to those of Alzheimer's (AD) patients.

APO/FPO
This can be expanded APO slash (or solidus, or virgule or something (s.t.)) FPO. See the MPO entry for further revelations.

apogee
Point of the moon's orbit about the earth when earth and moon are furthest apart. The moon doesn't have a very eccentric orbit, so this isn't very noticeable. If you want to get technical, you can insist that really both the earth and moon orbit their common center of gravity -- apoapsis of the earth moon system. But then if you want to get technical, the earth-moon system is not isolated; there are further small pulls from other bodies, and really it's all one big chaotic (in the mathematical sense) system. Good science is based on good approximations.

The definition above was pretty valid until the late 1950's. Now there are many earth satellites, and ``moon'' in the preceding is replaced by ``earth satellite.''

``Apogee'' is alos used figuratively, like zenith, to mean greatest (figurative) height.

APOLLO
Article Procurement with On-Line Local Ordering.

Apollo
NASA's program of three-man spacecraft that put a man on the moon in 1969. An eventual total of six Apollo missions each landed two men on the moon and brought them safely back.

I've seen ``APOLLO'' expanded as America's Program for Orbital and Lunar Landing Operations, but I think that's clearly creative back-formation: The initial program of one-man missions was called Mercury, and the subsequent two-man missions were called Gemini, very reasonably. (The Mercury and Apollo missions began to be planned during the Eisenhower administration, and the intermediate Gemini program was inserted afterwards.) A postage stamp issued by the Soviet Union to commemorate the Soyuz-Apollo link-ups spelled Apollo in a way that we would transliterate as Apollon. (Like many languages, Russian preserves the ending of the original Greek name. The words Mercury and Gemini are of Roman origin, but the god Apollo and his name were adopted by the Romans from the Greeks; and had no evident Roman antecedent.)

apollo
Spanish noun meaning `support.' Related to the verb apollar, `to oppose.' This isn't as odd as it looks. Apollar is to exert force against. If the force is opposed to the direction of another's exertions (una fuerza opuesta), then it is opposition. But if the force is somehow in tandem with another, buttressing or supporting or backing that other up against a third party or force, then it is support. In fact, apollo can also mean `opposition,' but in my experience, or at least in my speech community, it is usually `support.'

In a similar divergence, soporte is a noun meaning `support,' usually in a more literal, mechanical sense, but the verb soportar frequently means `withstand.' A more precise word for this, however, is aguantar. Thence aguantol, jocular ascription to pharmacology of the practice of sucking it up (stoicism, if you're unfamiliar with the slang) in the absence of an effective analgesic.

a pollo
Spanish phrase meaning `to chicken.' Not an especially common phrase, and not very useful either, unless you're straining for a pun.

APON
Association of Pediatric Oncology Nurses. Man, that must be heartbreaking.

apophasis
An ancient Greek word meaning `denial.' In the specialized terminology of rhetoric in Greek, it names the figure of expressing a positive idea by negation. Not bad, eh? The corresponding Latin rhetorical term is litotes. In English, the term apophasis came to be used instead for the figure that was called paraleipsis in Greek. I'm not going to make any recommendations or anything, but I don't think it would be a bad idea to avoid the term apophasis altogether, and use litotes or paraleipsis instead.

If there is a difference between the apophasis in its original Greek rhetorical sense and the Latin term litotes, it may be that apophasis is denial in general, whereas litotes generally refers to the use of denial for emphasis. My suspicion is based only (for now) on the text known as ``The Method of Forceful Speaking,'' [Peri Methodou Deinothtos]. This was preserved as part of a course packet (okay, okay, ``school text'') called ``Art of Rhetoric'' that was assembled in the 5th or 6th century CE. At that time, four of the five texts in the collection were generally regarded as the work of Hermogenes (a celebrated speaker, fl. second half of the 2nd c. BCE); on the basis of close textual reading, modern opinion disagrees, assigning at most two of the texts, and certainly not ``Method,'' to Hermogenes. So it's simply regarded as part of ``the Hermogenetic corpus,'' much as most works once regarded as the work of Hippocrates are now regarded as part of ``the Hippocratic corpus.''

No one has much of a clue who the true author was, so the Hermogenetic thing is trotted out. Anyway, chapter 37 of ``The Method of Forceful Speaking'' (the last chapter) is about apophasis, and the author points out that when compared with affirmation, apophasis sometimes has equal force, sometimes less, and sometimes greater.

Incidentally, the Greek term has an acute accent on the omicron: apóphasis. One could use this to indicate that one means apóphasis strictly in its Greek sense. For example: ``Alexander, in On Figures 2.23, uses the term antenantiôsis instead of apóphasis for this figure.'' (Be grateful for small favors: Alexander's term wasn't borrowed into English.)

apoplexiglas
Very strong, but shatters under emotional strain.

aposiopesis
It's a figure of speech that describes -- hey! pay attention! Now where was I? Oh yeah, aposiopesis: an abrupt breaking off of a thought. Uh, there was something else, um, I lost my train of -- oh! Compare brachyology.

apotropaic
This is usually defined as ``warding off evil,'' or ``having the power to protect from bad luck'' or something similar.

a potted watch never boils either
I'm not entirely sure what that means. I just wanted to put that out there, but it seems that Ogden Nash beat me to it.

A.P.P., APP
Accredited Purchasing Practitioner. A kind of junior grade of C.P.M. Certifying authority for both is the NAPM, q.v..

APP
American Principles Project. Politically conservative.

App., app., app
APPlication.

APP
Application Portability Profile.

app
APPlication (computer) program. I once got the impression that ap had become the more common spelling. Googling around now, I see ``killer app'' outnumbers ``killer ap'' about 20:1.

APP
Atactic PolyPropylene.

APPA
Whatever it stands for was founded in 1914. I guess it was the Academic Physical Plant Association. Its current name is Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers, but it keeps the old acronym.

APPA
The American Philosophical Practitioners Association.

APPC
Advanced Program-to-Program Communications. Acronym favored by IBM. (Also expanded ``Peer-to-Peer.'')

APPCN
Association of Postdoctoral Programs in Clinical Neuropsychology.

APPE
Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. Based in nearby Bloomington, Indiana.

(Well, I didn't say it was nearby you, now did I?)

appears weak on
A political phrase meaning `has a weakness that cannot be disguised on.'

APPI
American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc. Sometimes called the American Psychiatric Press, though that was apparently never its official name. Publishes the DSM, inter alia.

APPL
APPLicable. Like surcharges. Airline fare abbreviation.

APPL
The (US) Association of Partners for Public Lands. (Known as the Conference of National Park Cooperating Associations, 1977-1997.)

Apple Computer
Originated by Steven P. Jobs and Stephen G. Wozniak (Woz) in the garage of Jobs's parents, in 1976. You'd be surprised if they didn't have a web server.

A picture of an Apple I is part of the Smithsonian's Information Age photo exhibit (a photo gallery of its Information Age exhibit of around 1992).

applied chemistry
There doesn't seem to be any department of applied chemistry, so called, in the US today. A search on "department of applied chemistry" yields 568,000 ghits, but as far as I was willing to check, they apparently all refer to academic departments in Asia or Australia. Much of what might be called applied chemistry might as well be called chemical engineering, but there's a place for a distinction. Nevertheless, that place doesn't seem to be anywhere in US academia.

I hope that preamble justifies, or excuses, or at least whets your appetite for, the following, which is the entirety of a classified ad that ran on the front page of the New York Tribune on February 14, 1851. (And for heaven's sake, if it doesn't, don't read this!)

CHEMISTRY APPLIED TO THE ARTS--The Department of Chemistry applied to the Arts, in Brown University, will go into operation at the commencement of the next Collegiate Term, Feb. 28, 1851.
 This Department is intended to meet the wants of those who have occasion for a practical knowledge of Chemistry, whether with a view to its application in Manufacturing, Medicine, Pharmacy or Agriculture.  The Laboratory is designed for the accommodation of thirty students, and is supplied with every convenience for experimental study.  The course of each student being independent of the rest, admission to this Department is given at any time during the season.  For further information, address Prof. J. A. Porter, Providence, R.I.

APPN
Advanced Peer-to-Peer Network[ing]. (IBM.)

APR
Academic Progress Rate. A measure introduced by the NCAA to serve as a measure of college athletes' academic performance. In January 2005, the APR became the basis upon which the NCAA would assess collegiate athletic programs. One justly touted advantage over the measure that it supplants (the six-year graduation rate) is that it is a more real-time measure. Here is a poor explanation from the NCAA itself. As noted there, ``the implementation phase of academic reform [prompted many] `what ifs,' `how comes' and `why nots'.'' The reason for the confusion is that the ``entire academic-reform structure'' was cobbled together by the same kind of innumerate, incoherent, and inarticulate bone-heads who created the BCS.

The APR measures the academic performance only of students on athletic scholarships, and only in those sports in which a college competes within Division I. The NCAA sets limits, by sport and division, on the maximium number of scholarships that can be awarded. For example, 85 scholarships are allowed to a Division I-A football program, 13 to a Division-I men's basketball program. (The NCAA busybodies also impose some minima, so it may happen that a school that can't scrape together the required minimum of money for scholarships at Division II will be kicked down to Division III, where it can't award scholarships at all. There are very excellent reasons for such rules.)

For each scholarship athlete on a team, the team can earn up to two points per term toward the APR: one for the student's meeting academic eligibility standards and one for his or her return for the next term. If a student is about to graduate, return the following semester is not expected, and only one point is possible. This kind of consideration is complicated by the NCAA's eligibility criteria, which limit the number of years anyone is allowed to participate in student athletics (a single limit applies even if one graduates and goes on to graduate school). The total number of points a team can earn is cumulated over the semesters in a moving window of two, three, or four years and serves as a denominator in computing the APR. (Because data are not uniformly available for past years, the new assessment regime is being initiated with a two-year window. The window will be expanded in successive years as data become available.) The number of those possible points actually earned by scholarship athletes, multiplied by 1000, provides a numerator, and the quotient is the APR. A large fraction of teams achieve the maximum of 1000, because most NCAA teams are not football, baseball, or men's basketball.

An APR of 925 is estimated by the NCAA to correspond to a six-year graduation rate of 50%. The value of 925 will serve as a cut-off, with penalties being imposed only on those teams falling below it. For small teams, the cut-off is adjusted downward to take account of small-number statistics. (I.e., the measure is regarded as a sampling of an underlying performance, and a confidence interval is used to avoid penalizing a team that appears poor as a result of a statistical fluctuation.)

The kind of penalty that may be imposed if a school fails to meet the cut-off is a ``contemporary penalty.'' Other, more punitive ``historically-based penalties,'' to be based on both APR and GSR (graduation success rate), are under development as of 2005. These will target schools that chronically underperform.

Contemporary penalties are imposed only for ``0-for-2'' students (students that could have earned their teams two points in the APR measure, but earned none). The penalty is simply that the scholarship that had been awarded to that student, who has now left, cannot be reawarded (in that sport) for the following semester.

The limit on scholarships is a limit on the maximum number of scholarships allowed. That is, the number of 0-for-2's in a semester reduces by an equal number the maximum number of scholarships a team is allowed in the next semester. If a program is currently awarding fewer scholarships than the maximum that the NCAA allows, then initially the penalty has no bite.

APR
Accredited in Public Relations. Used as a title, like P.E. or MSW (e.g., ``Ted Turner, APR''). The accreditation is conferred in the US by the PRSA.

APR
Admission-to-Practice (law) Rules.

APR
Alarm-Processing Remote.

APR
Annual Percentage Rate. At one local bank they usually say just ``percentage rate'' and write APY.

APR
The Association of Petroleum Re-refiners. Based in Buffalo, NY; since the 1950's, it has represented companies whose primary business is the recycling of used oils by re-refining.

The initialism is often expanded with a second capital arr -- i.e., with ``Re-Refiners.'' The organization logo (displayed here and here) uses ``Re-refiners.'' The matter may be moot: the Internet reveals few signs of APR life since 1992, when it published the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Used Oil Recovery and Reuse, ``Re-Refining Rebirth,'' San Francisco, May 28-31, 1991.

Frankly, the whole business seems to make very little news or noise. Cf. National Oil Recyclers Association.

APRF
American Parapsychological Research Foundation.

APRI
American Prosecutors Research Institute. ``The research, development and technical assistance arm of the NDAA'' (National District Attorneys Association).

April
The cruelest month, according to T. S. Eliot. New Yorker update (from April 25, 1994) here.

Do April showers bring May flowers? Could be. Check at <weather.com>.

April 23
William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra both died on this date in 1616. Cervantes New Style and Shakespeare Old Style, so they actually died ten days apart.

Wordsworth also died on this date in 1850. That was just twelve days shy of 234 years after Shakespeare. It's okay not to be impressed. There is also a tradition that Shakespeare was born on April 23 (1554). That far back, the dates that are more likely to be recorded are those of baptisms.

a priority
Here's a sense of that phrase, or at least of that same letter sequence, that I'd never encountered before. Context: a seminar with Professor Guiseppina D'Oro (of Keele Univ.) at the (Ontario) Dominican College of Philosophy and Theology (May 21, 2004, at 2:30; Rm. 221). Title:
A priority and philosophical Analysis

Here's the beginning of the abstract:

The thesis of the autonomy of philosophy, the view that philosophy is a discipline with its own distinctive method and subject matter, has usually been connected with the possible existence of the a priori. Since knowledge in natural science is empirical or a posteriori, if there is a kind of knowing that is distinctively philosophical, this must be non empirical. The very possibility of philosophical knowledge is therefore intimately connected to that of a priori knowledge. ...

APRN
Advanced-Practice Registered Nurse.

APS
Active-Pixel Sensor. An imaging sensor whose pixels have individual amplifiers.

APS
Advanced Photo System.

APS
American Pain Society. They're just like the Sacher Masoch Club and the Marquis de Sade Union, except that they're interested in reducing pain.

APS
American Paraplegia Society.

APS
American Peptide Society. I'm for 'em.

APS
American Philosophical Society, founded 1743 (by Ben Franklin). A constituent society of the ACLS since 1919. ACLS has an overview.

APS
American Physical Society. A professional membership organization. Perform a Gedankenexperiment. Experiment with visiting their homepage.

The APS holds annual meetings of various subspecialties, and the big one-week meeting for condensed-matter physics is always held in mid-to-late March, occasionally edging into April. The meeting draws a few thousand physicists, so it must be held in a large city. In 1986, it was held in Las Vegas, Nevada.

On April 3, 1986, the AP wire carried an article entitled ``Physicists And Fun In Las Vegas: Never the Twain Shall Meet?'' I read it in the NYTimes or the WPost, where the headline was something like ``Physicists pile into Las Vegas with a big thud.'' The AP item led off with

As a group whose idea of a good time is listening to a lecture on The Fractional Quantum Hall Effect, the 4,500 studious scientists of the American Physical Society aren't exactly painting the town red.

Dan Dahlberg, a U. Minn. physics professor, was quoted saying ``The hookers are going broke, the bartenders are going broke and the casino is dead. We'll probably never be invited back here.'' I notice that the article byline is Tim Dahlberg. (The article was based more on interviews than observation. One important event not reported was a reception on the first or second day, in a big ground-floor ballroom at the MGM Grand (which was the single venue for the various parallel sessions). Each attendee received a ticket for one complimentary drink. At the event, people were going around trying to find someone to give their tickets away to.)

I was there, and like many of my post-doc fellows I dutifully brought a roll of quarters to insert in machines, but I lost interest after a couple of dollars of principal.

I drove in from LA in a rented car, and I have to tell you, Vegas can't be sin city. Exhibit A: taxis. Rounding the MGM Grand, there was a cabby in the lane to my right who wanted to get in my lane and he didn't cut me off! I was infuriated, outraged! Drivers who perform wildly unexpected maneuvers are a hazard, and a cabby who doesn't cut you off and assume you'll slam on the brakes at the last minute is doing something dangerously unpredictable. They ought to get those timid menaces off the road!

Also, a number of attractive women in simple clothing smiled at me with unexpected warmth, practically as if we knew each other. Las Vegas is just a friendly, old-fashioned small town with all-American Gemütlichkeit, plus bright lights.

Viva, Las Vegas!

APS
American Physiological Society.

APS
American Phytopathological Society. You should be able to determine on your own which APS is the one you need to deal with.

APS
American Psychological Society.

Aps
Apus. Official IAU abbreviation for the constellation.

APS
Atmospheric Plasma Spraying.

APS
Australian Psychological Society.

APS
Automated Patent System.

APS
Automatic Protection-Switching.

APSA
American Pediatric Surgical Association.

APSA
American Political Science Association, founded in 1903. Since 1920, a constituent ``learned society'' of the ACLS, which gives you an idea of how loosely the term ``learned'' is used. ACLS has an overview.

APsaA
American PSychoAnalytic Association.

APSC
American Association of Psychiatric Services for Children.

APSS
Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

APSU
Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. Find there George Pesely's Home Page and James D. Lester's ``Citing Cyberspace.''

Austin Peay, the man after whom this institution of higher learning is named, made a plodding but successful career as lawyer in Clarksville. He was governor of Tennessee from 1922 until his death in October 1927.

APT
Alum-Precipitated Toxoid.

APT
Application Programmer's Toolkit.

APT
Association of Polysomnographic Technologists. It ``is an international society of professionals dedicated to improving the quality of sleep and wakefulness in all people.''

APT
Attached Proton Test. In NMR.

APTA
American Physical Therapy Association.

APTA
American Polarity Therapy Association. They sell the Brooklyn Bridge, but it's not a scam because they truly believe that they sell the Brooklyn Bridge. ``Energy is the real substance behind the appearance of matter and forms.''

APTA
American Public Transit Association.

apteryx
A genus of flightless birds found in New Zealand, related to the extinct moa. As the Greek name implies, they have no wings. Really! How do they scat flies? The birds are better known by their Maori name, kiwi.

Metaphorically, then word kiwi was used as early as 1918 in the sense of `grounded airman.' Metonymically, it has come to be used for New Zealanders.

APTES
3-AminoPropylTriEthoxySilane.

apt misspelling
This entry is reserved for an incident that can't plausibly be placed in the benefit-of-the-doubt entry (below).

APTS
Association of Public Television Stations.

apt typo
I was finally inspired to create this overdue entry upon reading the following text in one online review of a tanning salon: ``[She] singed me up today for tanning she was helpful and friendly!!'' Judging from some of the other, less-recent-but-wiser reviews, he may get burned.

APU
Arithmetic Processing Unit. A term rather less common than arithmetic logic unit (ALU).

APU
Auxiliary Power Unit.

The APU's on NASA's space shuttles are gas turbines used to drive the pumps that pressurize the shuttle's hydraulic systems. These systems lower landing gear and move body flaps, rudder and other flight control surfaces, and power some systems in the main (propulsion) engine. The turbines are spun by gas from the decomposition of hydrazine.

APU
Azusa Pacific University. In Azusa, California. ``In order to create an institutional environment marked by God honoring excellence, Azusa Pacific University expects all faculty, staff, and students to familiarize themselves with current university policies.'' I think I'd like to honor whoever punctuated that.

APUA
Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics.

APUA
Antigua Public Utilities Authority. Antigua the Caribbean island.

APV
AmPrenaVir. A drug used in the treatment of AIDS.

APVA
The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. Their main claim to fame is the Jamestown Rediscovery, excavations conducted since 1994. The triangular fort burned down in 1608, a year after it was built. It had been widely believed that meanderings of the James River had washed any remains away. The rediscovery was announced on September 12, 1996.

APVMA
Alberta Pressure Vessel Manufacturers' Association.

APVMA
American Pre-Veterinary Medical Association. It's ``a college-level national chapter organization dedicated to promote and stimulate interest in the field of veterinary medicine and provide its member clubs with sources of information regarding sister clubs and the field of veterinary medicine.'' The APVMA's web home has bounced around a bit.

APW
Augmented Plane Wave. See J. C. Slater, Phys. Rev. 51, 846 (1937).

APWA
American Public Welfare Association. Now the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA).

APWA
American Public Works Association. It's ``an international educational and professional association of public agencies, private sector companies, and individuals dedicated to providing high quality public works goods and services.

Originally chartered in 1937, APWA is the largest and oldest organization of its kind in the world, with headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri, an office in Washington, D.C., and 67 chapters throughout North America. APWA provides a forum in which public works professionals can exchange ideas, improve professional competency, increase the performance of their agencies and companies, and bring important public works-related topics to public attention in local, state and federal arenas.''

[Football icon]

APY
All-Purpose Yards. Yards rushing plus yards receiving.

APY
Annual Percentage Yield.

AQ
Agent Query. (I'm just passing the word along -- not endorsing or denouncing it.) AQ offers a place for writers and literary agents to find each other, and various book-trade resources.

.aq
(Domain name code for) Antarctica.

aq
AQueous. Chemists use it.

AQA
American Quack Association. An association of American quacks. For an alternative perspective, visit Quackwatch. The AQA, founded in 1995, appears no longer to be active as such. For further information, visit this site.

AQA
(UK) Assessment and Qualifications Alliance. One of three college entrance exam boards implicated in a grading scandal in 2002. AQA chief executive at the time: Kathleen Tattersall, who missed out on nomen est omen honors because the competition is too stiff, and because I control who gets in. More at the QCA entry.

AQA
Australian Quadriplegic Association. Old name; see SCIA.

AQAP
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Based in Yemen.

AQAP
As Quickly As Possible. Variant of more common ASAP.

AQC
Association québécoise de Chirurgie.. French: `Quebec Surgical Association.' (Formerly l'ACGQ.)

AQCR
Air Quality Control Region.

AQI
Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

AQI
Associazione politica-culturale 'Quarta Internazionale'. Italian, `Cultural-Political Association of the Fourth International.'

AQIM
Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb.

AQIS
Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service. ``Australian Quarantine Service'' for short.

Why are we providing you with this information? We want to be your full-service acronym glossary.

Aqiva
Vide Akiva.

AQL
{Acceptable | Accepted} Quality Level[s]. The target level of confidence (typically 95%) that initial inspection will be passed.

Aql
Aquila. Official IAU abbreviation for the constellation.

AquaFresh Defense, The
The claim that someone has spiked your toothpaste with illegal drugs. At the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, a German athlete who tested positive for steroids made this claim in appealing his suspension. An unidentified Olympic official said
It's a pretty daring move. You don't often see the AquaFresh Defense put into action this early in a competition.

Aqualung
An excellent album by Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson's group. A concept album -- one in which the songs shared a common theme. Of sorts.

The punk rock movement arose in part as a reaction to the increasing pretentiousness of mainstream rock, as represented by such phenomena as concept albums and the pretentiousness of members of the band Who when they were not stoned.

aqualung
The name of the first scuba gear. Concept by Jacques Cousteau. Tested by him off the coast of Vichy France, with his wife swimming overhead as part of a look-out relay against the authorities.

aqueduct
There is some confusion about the meaning of this word, despite its obvious etymology [L. aquae (`of water') + ductus (gerund for `leading')]. The principal meaning of aqueduct is an artificial channel or conduit for water. The term is also used in some oldish anatomical names for tubes connecting organs. (E.g., aqueduct of Fallopius is an old name for what we now call the fallopian tube. The Latin form aquaeductus Fallopii is even older.) This particular usage, however, reflects an error of transmission. See the Falloppio entry.

Anyway, the mistaken impression that many people have is that aqueduct means bridge. This is due to the fact that the best-known aqueducts are the ones built by the Romans, and the most prominent parts of those are the aqueduct bridges -- the tour guide points and says (or the caption reads) ``Roman aqueduct'' and the tourists (or readers) think: ah, bridge built on arches. In fact, Roman aqueducts typically ran about a meter underground for most of their length (say 10 to 100 km), maintained by teams of slaves. Aqueducts only came above ground when topography required it -- typically to cross a valley or gully, or as they approached the city they supplied.

Ancient aqueducts worked by gravity feed, flowing from a high source distant from the point of use (a city). In some cases, aqueducts provided water primarily for baths, and there was no extensive distribution system. In general, however, the city had a distribution system which also worked by gravity feed through plumbing. For both gravity-feed purposes (into and in the city), water height had to be husbanded as a resource, and for most of their length, aqueducts descended slowly. Over these distances, Roman aqueducts were open channels: there was air above a water surface in the channel. Outside the city's plumbing system, the only closed channels were inverted siphons, mostly below ground level, used to cross depressions that were narrow and shallow. Where an inverted siphon was considered impractical, the aqueduct came above ground. To get across depressions deeper than about 50 m, the Romans did not use inverted siphons but instead built aqueduct bridges. Probably the best known of those today is the one at Nîmes, which over the years has been converted to other uses, including just a plain old (quite old) bridge. The bridges supported a nearly horizontal aqueduct on multiple tiers of arches or columns or both. Over long stretches that required moderate elevation (often in the final approach to a city), the aqueduct might be supported on a colonnade.

Aqueduct Raceway in Queens, New York took its name from the same aqueduct aluded to in the names Conduit Boulevard and Conduit Avenue.

AQUINAS
A QUantum Interconnected Network Array Simulator. A simulation code for circuits of quantum cellular automata.

Aqr
Aquarius. Official IAU abbreviation for the constellation.

Aquarius is a popular name for other things than the constellation. One instance is explained in Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. Lovell was commander of the mission and chose names for the two parts of the spacecraft with crew compartments. A parenthetical remark on page 87 begins thus:

The press had erroneously reported that Aquarius was chosen as a tribute to Hair, -- a musical Lovell had not seen and had no intention of seeing. The truth was, he took the name from the Aquarius of Egyptian mythology, the water carrier who brought fertility and knowledge to the Nile valley.

I'm not sure where that ``knowledge'' thing came from. Aquarius is a Latin constellation name, of course, but essentially the same constellation has been known by various names since Babylonian times. The Egyptian names of the constellation's three brightest stars all begin with Sada-, meaning `lucky.' In the case of Apollo 13, Aquarius was lucky indeed.

Apollo 13 was an ill-starred mission, as should have been obvious from the hubristic braggadocio surrounding the number 13 and from Lovell's choice of ``Odyssey'' as the name of the command module. About 56 hours into the mission, one of the oxygen tanks in the service module exploded, quickly making the service module useless for almost everything other than protecting the command module's heat shield. The lunar module was designed to ferry two of the three Apollo astronauts between the command-service module (the combined command and service modules) and the surface of the moon, and to support those two during their brief stay there. ``Brief stay'' there means two days. In the emergency, it was pressed into service as a lifeboat, providing power and other consumables for the remaining 87 hours of the aborted mission. The LM's descent stage was used for propulsion in place of the the service module's rockets. (The ascent stage could have been used for propulsion in principle, but the batteries that carried most of the electrical power remaining to the crippled craft were part of descent stage, and would have had to be jettisoned in order for the ascent stage to be used.)

According to Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed, by Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr., ``[w]hen the astronauts boarded the Iwo-Jima, a band struck up `Aquarius.' ...'' (p. 198). That was one of the numbers from the rock opera Hair mentioned above. Somewhere that I can't find now, I read that two of the Apollo 13 astronauts eventually went to see Hair later and hated it. They walked out after the first half, saying later that it was blasphemous or something.

The song ``Aquarius'' has some fine-sounding lyrics, including ``This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.'' This refers to the precession of the equinoxes. In mechanical terms, what is precessing is the axis of rotation of the Earth. As it precesses, the vernal equinox (as also the autumnal equinox and the solstices) occurs at a different place in the Earth's orbit of the Sun. One can assign ``ages'' according to the constellation the Sun is in at the time of the vernal equinox. Determining when an age begins should be a simple matter of determining what sectors of the sky are assigned to each constellation. This is necessarily a matter of convention, since the zodiacal constellations, projected onto the equator, subtend very different angles and generally overlap. In principle, one ought to be able to deduce what positions are assigned to which sign by working backwards from the astrological conventions, but that in turn follows at least a couple of different conventions. It's not a lot of fun tracking down what these conventions might be, because the people who define them take them so seriously it's sad.

But sometimes it's good. I personally have benefitted from astrology! I met this girl on the internet, and her picture looked okay, and there were some common interests and we progressed to phone communication and she invited me for dinner and I thought -- ``what the hey?'' (Free food.) While we'd talked she had asked me when and where I was born, and commented that I was born on a Monday. To her consternation, I pointed out that this was incorrect. It turned out that her astrology software wasn't working properly. There's a concept, for ya. She eventually emailed to disinvite me. I guess she rebooted and discovered that we weren't really that good of a match. I think I knew this as sure as the day I was born.

Anyway, the precession time period is a bit under 26000 years, so equal-length ages assigned to twelve zodiac signs would last about 2160 years. On this scale even a dawn could last a long time. In most estimations the age of Pisces covers the first two millennia AD. Pisces is a relatively big constellation, and some people have its age continuing another 600 years, but a common calculation based on exactly or approximately equal ages has the age of Aquarius beginning as soon as 2100. For various good reasons, such as that it's a round number and close, some people have it begun in 2000. ``Age of Aquarius'' is also used describe the 1960's (which means 1968, or 1963-1972, or hippies and psychedelic rock album covers) or the 1970's, or the New Age age. It's a periodization with a bit of give.

A/R
Accounts Receivable.

AR
Anti-Reflective, Anti-Reflection. The simplest sort of AR coating (more at ARC) is a layer one quarter wavelength thick. Obviously, this only works perfectly at a single wavelength. However, index of refraction tends to fall with increasing frequency (except near absorption features in the spectrum, but we're talking transparent materials here, so that's irrelevant). Since wavelength in a dielectric is decreased from its vacuum value by a factor of the index of refraction (n), the optical thickness of the AR coating, measured in units of wavelength, varies less rapidly than wavelength. This is pretty handy in visible light work, since the visible spectrum spans a factor of two in wavelength. The value of 0.25 wavelengths comes from a ray-optics analysis that ignores variations in reflection at the coating-lens or coating-substrate interface.

AR
Archaeological Reports. A supplement to the Journal of Hellenic Studies (JHS, q.v.).

.ar
(Domain code for) Argentina.

This map server seems to be a compromise -- Las Malvinas (Falklands) yes; hefty pie-slice of Antarctica no. Fukuyama's ``The End of History'' was not the end of Geography. (Yes, yes, he didn't mean it that way, everybody judged by the title and not by the content. Doesn't matter; he was wrong anyway.)

See also AWWWA.

An FAQ for the soc.culture.argentina newsgroup, the #argentina IRC channel, and other Argentine nets can be found at the OSU hypertext faq archive. `` Governments on the WWW'' serves an Argentina page.

Argentina is a sad case. A country rich in natural resources and certain kinds of human resources, but very poor in social sanity. One Argentine joke goes that Argentina becomes rich at night, when Argentines are sleeping. Back when Rockefeller was a byword for wealth, the story was told that John D. Rockefeller visited Argentina and said -- ``it's a beautiful country, I want to buy it! But only on one condition: no Argentines.'' After hours of study, I have discovered the real cause of Argentina's problems, a cause only an AG (acronym glossarist) could have recognized. The fundamental problem Argentina suffers is an excess of organization. Argentines spend so much time creating, recreating, renaming, seceding from, retasking, and in general multiplying organizations, attending meetings, denouncing, resolving, campaigning, scheming for control, making new allies and punishing former allies, that they have no time left over to do any useful work.

Ar
ARgon. Atomic number 18. Third-period noble gas. It was discovered after Lord Rayleigh tried (1893) to measure the density of nitrogen gas accurately: he found that chemically-generated nitrogen gas was less dense than nitrogen separated from air, by a small but persistent amount. The reason was that his chemical separations relied on the assumption that nitrogen was the only component of air not being removed by reaction, but one percent of the atmosphere is argon, much less reactive yet than nitrogen gas. (This is slightly more impressive when you consider that an atom of argon is 42.6% heavier than a molecule of nitrogen, so the persistent density difference was half a percent.)

As a practical matter, this Ar is used much more often to represent the uncompounded element than as a part of a compound, since compounds of the rare gases are rare and fragile things. But benzene rings are very common, so you should be aware that in organic chemistry, the Ar symbol is used to represent a general aryl group.

Learn more (about argon) at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

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Ar.
Aristophanes. This (Ar.) is the established conventional abbreviation used by classicists (writing in English). It doesn't stand for Aristotle (Arist.). Aristophanes was reckoned in his time the greatest of the old Attic comedy writers. Mnemonic for the abbreviation:
'Ar! 'Ar! Oh, that's funny!

It works better if you think of the apostrophes as breathing marks.

AR
ARkansas. If you had to pick a state for which the standard address http://www.state.ar.us/ did not work, wouldn't this one be it? Ah, it's up now. USPS abbreviation.

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Arkansas. USACityLink.com has a page for Arkansas.

A&R
Artist and Repertoire. A music-industry term. If I'm ever going to sell the physics rock songs I've composed, I'll probably have to learn what A&R means too.

Ar
ARyl group. A group containing a benzene ring. The symbol is used in representations of general reactions, just as R is used to represent a general organic group. In context, there's no great danger of this Ar being confused with the elemental Ar.

When there are multiple general aryl groups to be represented, either primed (Ar' and Ar'') or subscripted (Ar1, Ar2, etc.) symbols might be used, but I think the subcripted scheme is more common. Sometimes Ar2 will represent two of the same aryl group, just to make sure you're awake and keep you on your twos.

AR
Assistant Rector. A position of assistant respect in the Notre Dame University residence hall system. Each residence hall has a hierarchical system of one rector, assistant rectors, and resident assistants (RA).

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A&R
Atene e Roma. `Athens and Rome.' An Italian classics journal catalogued in TOCS-IN.

The Greek letter theta is now widely taken to represent the voiceless sibilant represented by th in English words like thick. The sound has long been common in Germanic languages, as evidenced by the rune Þ that used to represent it (the sound has disappeared in High German). This sound value for the letter theta has been formalized in the IPA. Italian lacks that sound, and a tau-theta distinction is not observed in words borrowed from Greek. Castilian, as now pronounced in most of Spain, does have the Þ sound, but like Italian generally uses a Roman letter tee for any theta in a Greek loan word.

As it happens, the Italian and Spanish transcription is more true to the original pronunciation than is the English ``th.'' One of the clearest conclusions of phonemic reconstructions of Ancient Greek is that theta was not a sibilant. [You can look up the details in W. Sidney Allen: Vox Graeca (1968, 1987).] The sound assignment of theta in the IPA probably represents the strong influence of Henry Sweet and British Victorian Hellenism. (It also represents simple expedience: given the evolution of languages and the multiple application of a few alphabets to many and various languages' phonemes, every character assignment is to some degree arbitrary.)

What the tau-theta distinction represented in Ancient Greek was aspiration: tau and theta were articulated similarly, but theta was aspirated. If you speak only modern European languages (``SAE's'') then you probably don't usually notice the distinction. A guide to recognizing the distinction for the p sound can be found at the emic entry. It's a similar situation: the Greek letters pi and phi are unaspirated and aspirated versions of the same unvoiced bilabial plosive. Likewise, kappa and chi were unaspirated and aspirated versions of the unvoiced alveolar plosive (see the TeX entry).

Speakers of SAE's generally do use both aspirated and unaspirated consonants, but the distinction is allophonic. If we are systematic about it at all, we are unconsciously systematic. Degree of aspiration of t- and p-sounds in English stop consonants like /k,kh/, /p,ph/, /t,th/, typically depends on what sound follows. [Aspiration is indicated by a superscript aitch (h) in the IPA.]

In Indo-European (IE) languages of the India subcontinent, and in Semitic languages like Hebrew as they were spoken as recently as two thousand years ago, aspiration matters (``is phonemic''). Semitic alphabets, in addition to lacking vowels, did not indicate aspiration systematically. Various supplementary systems of ``pointing'' were developed for Hebrew, and the extant Tiberian pointing scheme preserves an aspiration distinction that in some cases is no longer observed, or that has evolved into a different distinction.

The transliteration scheme for Hebrew names that is used by the Roman Catholic Church follows the traditional Latin scheme for indicating aspiration -- an aitch following. An example of how this works is in one of the names of God, Adonai Ts'vaot in a common transliteration of the Modern Hebrew pronunciation. This was simply an epithet in Hebrew -- `Lord of hosts [armies]' -- and was sometimes translated. However, it eventually became one of the seven nomina sacra (`sacred names') of God, rendered Kyrios Sabaoth in Greek and Dominus Deus Sabaoth in Latin. The final aitch represents aspiration on the Hebrew letter tav.

(In this particular instance, the aitch used to indicate aspiration reflects an initial transliteration into Greek. Jerome, who knew Hebrew, usually translated the epithet directly into a corresponding Latin epithet -- Dominus Exercituum.)

AR
Authors Registry. (Sic.) An authors' registry founded in 1996. ``[A] non-profit organization formed to help expedite the flow of royalty payments and small re-use fees to authors, particularly for new-media uses. It's been called the ASCAP for writers. Virtually every important writers' organization and more than 100 literary agencies cooperate with the Registry. We're the largest coming-together of authors ever.''

Hooray for us!!!

See also the Authors Guild.

Yes, yes, their homepage demonstrates that they know how to use apostrophes in normal writing; they've evidently chosen to use a plural-form attributive noun (authors) in their name just to drive the editors' registry to distraction. One may regard this as a historical quirk.

AR
Auto-Regression. Not what happens to your car if you miss too many payments.

ar
Name of the letter which is number 18 in the English alphabet. That's according to the OSPD4, which gives a plural ars. These two-letter and three-letter words are accepted by all three major Scrabble dictionaries. I've always written the letter name arr, but none of those dictionaries accepts this. No wonder I lost. (All three accept both es and ess, with their respective -es plurals; OSPD4 says they both name the next letter. I can't buy a break. Can I buy a vowel? Oops -- wrong game.)

ARA
Academy of Rehabilitative Audiology. ``The primary purpose of ARA is to promote excellence in hearing care through the provision of comprehensive rehabilitative and habilitative services.''

``Academy'' seems to be an especially popular word in the names of audiologists' professional organizations. Cf. AAA, ADA, and AAPPSPA.

ARA
Altstoff Recycling Austria, AG. A company that runs the Austrian counterpart of the German Green Point system (see DSD).

``Recycling''? ``Austria''? First Austria Presse Agentur (APA), now this. What language do they speak in Österreich (.at)?

ARA
American Recovery Association, Inc.

ARA
American Restroom Association. ``Restroom''? Is that what you're doing in there all that time? Finish up and get out! Other people want to go! See also this WTO entry.

ARA
American Rheumatism Association. This inevitably makes everyone think of Inspector Clouseau checking into his hotel and failing to make himself understood when he asks for his ``rhheeeuuum!'' BTW, the ARA is now the ACR.

ARA
American Running Association. (And here I thought everybody ran pretty much the same way.) Nothing at all to do with the other ARA.

ARA
AppleTalk Remote Access.

ARA
Archaeological Residue Analysis. Here are some words from an ARA Project at the Department of Anthropology at Lakehead University.
The Archaeological Residue Analysis (ARA) Project is a multi-disciplinary project that is examining archaeological residues and how they are analysed.

An increasing list of animal and plant residues such as blood, pollen, phytoliths, raphides, starch grains, fats, tissues, feathers, scales, fibres, hair and other biomarkers are increasingly identified on archaeological artefacts such as ceramics and lithic tools.

Ara
Ara. The official IAU abbreviation for the constellation named Ara. When you're going with t.l.a.'s, it doesn't leave you a lot of options.

ARA
Awards and Recognition Association. ``[An] organization of over 4,300 companies that design outstanding awards to recognize great achievements.'' They're talking about the actual physical tokens -- the plaques and such.

Back in 1989 or '90, I stopped into a coin shop in Cambridge to price an MBE. Fifty quid. I think that only got you the hardware (``used'').

Arab
A town in Alabama. Town name is pronounced with the first A long.

Arab League
League of Arab States. An agreement to form a ``League of [independent] Arab States'' was the principal plank of the ``Alexandria Protocol'' (1944). Prof. Ed Haynes at Winthrop Univ. maintains some generally favorable third-party information.

Aral Sea
This entry doesn't have a lot to say about the Aral Sea, or maybe the future Aral Salt Pond. Inadequate entries (too little of water and too much of industrial waste and fertilizer runoff) are part of the problem of the Aral Sea, now receded into two or three seas, so this entry is somehow appropriate. You can learn a bit more about it at its entry in Wikipedia.

All I wanted to say here is that the Aral in the name is not the adjective form of Ar, Ara, or any other noun. It may be obvious on reflection, but it looks and sounds like an adjective and it could have something to do with arid.

Thomas H. Huxley published an item entitled ``On a Piece of Chalk'' in 1868. He starts out describing the geographical extent of the chalk underlying much of England. He says the chalk ``may be traced as the shores of the Sea of Aral, in Central Asia.''

ARAEM
Atomic Resolution Analytical Electron Microscop{e | y}.

DRAM used in Digital Answering Machine application. ( Example here.)

ARAM
Audio RAM. Good-enough DRAM used in Digital Answering Machine application. (Example here.)

ARAMCO
ARabian AMerican (Petroleum) CO.

ARB
(California) Air Resources Board. Abbreviated CARB in the automobile industry. Also called by a lot of less nice names within the automobile industry.

ARB
Angiotensin Receptor Blocker.

ARB
Architectural Review Board. Computer Software architecture. See OpenGL.

ARBA
American Reference Books Annual.

arba
Hebrew and Arabic for `four.' In both languages, various related words, including the one for `(one) fourth,' begin in r (i.e. resh or ra, respectively). Among these the best-known to English-speakers is probably rubaiyat, plural of rubaiyah, `quatrain.' Originally Arabic, the term was adopted in Persian, whence it entered English via Edward Fitzgerald's inspired translation of (many of the) rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Arbeit Macht Frei
Words inscribed over the gateway at the Auschwitz death camp. If death is freedom, then the words were accurate enough, since those who were not gassed immediately were worked to death. The most literal translation would be `Work Makes [one] Free.' I've seen it translated `Work Makes Freedom'' (by Roth in Shop Talk, p. 5, for instance), but frei is just an adjective. The construction macht + [adjective] is a common idiom in German.

árbol
Spanish: `tree.' The word arbol is obviously a cognate of English words like arboreal (Spanish: arbóreo), ultimately from the Latin arbor, `tree.' We have some information on Spanish words for fruit trees at the fruta entry.

In Spanish versions of the Bible, the ``tree of knowledge of good and evil'' of Genesis chapter 2 is ``el ´bol del conocimiento del bien y del mal.'' (Just as in English this is often abbreviated as ``tree of knowledge,'' so in Spanish one has ``´bol del conocimiento.'') That is an ordinary wording for contemporary Spanish, and is used in the Nueva Versión Internacional, La Biblia de las Américas, and in the 1995 Reina-Valera edition. In older translations, however, particularly the Reina-Valera until as recently as 1960, it was ``el ábol de la ciencia del bien y del mal.'' This reflects the original older sense of science (in English and French) and ciencia, from the Latin scientia, `knowledge.' This usage is so archaic that when I saw a 1911 book with the title El Ábol de la Ciencia on the dollar table, I thought ``cool! a novel about science!'' and bought it. I even mentioned it in this glossary, and it took more than two years before I realized my error.

arbovirus
ARthropod-BOrne VIRUS.

ARC
(NIDA's) Addiction Research Center. Researching addiction since 1935. Looks like they can't quit!

ARC
Agence du revenu du Canada. English name: Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). It used to be the ADRC.

ARC
Aging Research Centre. ``Centre'' here apparently means ``central website.'' It's global, so it's spherically symmetric: you can put the center anywhere you like.

ARC
AIDS-Related Complex. In the early days, before HIV had even been isolated, there was a thought or a hope that this might be a milder form of the then-unidentified syndrome. Since AIDS had to be diagnosed from symptoms at that time, this kind of definitional matter was serious business (with insurance- and other financial consequences). ARC was afterwards understood to be really `just' early-stage, or symptomatically milder, HIV infection, just the same as AIDS. The term isn't much used anymore, since severity of symptoms varies dramatically over time.

ARC
Alberta Research Council. It's organized as a ``crown corporation,'' whatever that is, but it doesn't compete with private corporations.

ARC
American Red Cross.

ARC
(NASA's) Ames Research Center.

ARC
Annual Required Contribution.

ARC
Anti-Reflective (AR) Coating. Typically a quarter-wavelength film -- a zero of reflection amplitude occurs around 1/4 wavelength if the ARC has an index of refraction larger than the light-source medium and smaller than the light's destination medium. The zero occurs at exactly one quarter wavelength only in the limit that the indices of refraction are very different. More on frequency-dependence at AR entry.

ARC
Appalachian Regional Commission.

Arc, ARC
Widely used jargon, short for ArcGIS -- GIS software from Esri. A list of ArcGIS user groups, browsed on January 3, 2016, had only two UG's with ``ArcGIS'' in the name, and 16 others with ``Arc.'' (Like most groups listed, these were all in the US.) Another 28 or so had ``GIS'' (and not ``Arc'' or ``ArcGIS'') in the name. This ought to mean, at least in principle, that users of non-Esri software participate, and that is clearly true in some cases. GIS is a generic term, but Esri is the market leader in GIS software, and wouldn't seem to mind capturing the term. (They've managed to take over the term ``GIS-centric.'' Compare: when Ford ruled the roads, at least the company didn't try to take ``automotive'' private. Likewise, neither ``Andersen Windows and Doors'' nor any smaller company has tried to trademark the word ``windows,'' to say nothing of ``word'' itself. Hmmm.)

ArcGIS is the brand name that seems to cover the entire suite of Esri's software products. Esri brands many of its individual products with ``Arc,'' including ArcGIS Server, ArcCatalog, ArcIMS, ArcMap, ArcGIS Mobile, ArcPad, ArcSDE, and ArcToolbox. But perhaps they're not as as Arc-crazy as they once were, when the three levels of licensing (i.e., features) of ``ArcGIS for Desktop'' ArcView (now ``Basic''), ArcEdit (now ``Standard''), and ArcInfo (now ``Advanced''). If they'd rebranded ArcView as ``Basic101'' they could have preserved the all-important feature of constant string-length. (Ohn wait -- it was ``ArcEditor,'' not ``ArcEdit'': two missed opportunities.) Well, you can't have everything; I'm just glad they don't abuse ``solution,'' the way many software vendors do.

Arc in the name of all these products is at least an allusion to the word arc in its conventional sense of a segment of a circle. However, Esri also uses arc in a somewhat different technical sense as a kind of data element.

ARC
Association for Retarded Citizens of the United States. Original name of an organization that now calls itself simply The Arc. (Smart move.)

ARC
Australian Resuscitation Council.

ARC
Author Review Copy. Last chance for author or authors to make corrections before printing. At one time, ARC's were large-sheet off-prints (``galleys'') of typeset text. Now digital ARC's are standard.

ARCA
Area Requiring Corrective Action. Area in the abstract sense of an area of competence.

ARCA
Automobile Racing Club of America. A ``circle-track'' racing association. Vide goracing.com, VROOM!

ARCC
At-Risk Child Care.

[column]

ARCE, A.R.C.E.
American Research Center in Egypt (.eg). Founded in 1948 to assist the archaeological programs of American institutions in Egypt. It eventually expanded its role and now also serves as a base for Egyptian area studies projects based in the US.

[column]

ARCE/NC
American Research Center in Egypt -- Northern California (chapter).

[column]

ARCE/NW
NorthWest chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt. ``Northwest'' here means the region around or in the University of Washington.

[column]

Archaeologica
A website that posts news of archaeological and historical interest. Updated daily.

Archaeologies of Materiality
The title of a ``text,'' as they say, from Blackwell Publishing, 2005, edited by Lynn Meskell. Self-parody this good is hard to top. But can the content measure up? I'll never know, because there isn't enough caffeine in the world.

In the first paragraph of the introductory chapter, Meskell explains: ``That is one of the major aims of this volume, to provide an array of object orientations in particular and varied contexts, indeed the first to showcase substantive archaeological case studies devoted to the exploration of materiality.''

Foucault (Michel, not Léon) popularized the use of archaeology in the metaphorical sense of excavation of hidden significance (or anything like that) with the publication of his The Archaeology of Knowledge (L'Archéologie du Savoir, 1969). I don't know who popularized the pluralization of mass nouns as a mechanical way of indicating an author's admirable awareness of the subtle fact that things referred to by the same term differ, but with any luck that person is pushing up semanto-sarcophago-(onto)logical daisies as well.

ARCHI
Australian Resource Centre for Healthcare Innovations.

Archie
  1. Nickname for Archibald.
  2. The name of a comics series! It featured the characters Archie, Betty, Jughead, Reggie, Veronica and many of their parents and high-school teachers!
  3. Name of software that ARCHIvEs multiple ftp sites (pronounced like the other Archies)! Does for ftp sites what Veronica was later designed to do for gopher sites! Both of these systems are obsolete or almost!

Archies, The
They had a hit late in 1969 with a sweet song ``Sugar Sugar,'' which included
Pour a little sugar on me honey!
among other similar lyrics.

In one of her last books (probably Wars I Have Seen, 1945), Gertrude Stein observes that in wartime sugar disappears but honey is plentiful.

Archie was an eponymous comic-strip character, see previous entry!

[column]

Archimedes
An owl who is Merlin's friend in Disney's ``The Sword and the Stone.'' Hey look, the map says Syracuse is in upstate New York. This was the only definition that made sense. Incidentally, Euclid is a street in Syracuse, and it doesn't meet any of its parallels.

Here's a bibliography.

[column]

ARCHPUB
A moderated announcement list and discussion group ``aiming to provide a platform for the announcement and review of archaeological publications (i.e., recently published or forthcoming books, journals, etc.). Updates and monthly additions to Archaeology on the Net Books Database will also be announced through ARCHPUB. ARCHPUB is mainly an announcement list with weekly 1 to 4 postings sent to the members by the list owner. These are collected from over 50 discussion groups and web sites. List members may contribute with their book announcements or reviews of particular titles. The list is open to professionals, students, and others with an interest in archaeology.''

To subscribe send the message:
subscribe ARCHPUB
to <majordomo@mail.serve.com>
.

More information is available at:
http://www.serve.com/archaeology/archpub/index.html

ARCOFI
Audio Ringing COdec FIlter.

ARCS
The American Review of Canadian Studies. A refereed quarterly multidisciplinary journal published by ACSUS. It receives funding from the Canada-US Fulbright Program / le Programme Fulbright Canada-É.U.

ARCS ``examines Canada and the Canadian point of view from an American perspective.'' Of course, this raises the question, to what extent an American academic perspective is particularly an American viewpoint. Whoa! Let me grab onto something -- my Weltanschauung is spinning out of control!

ARCS
American Research Center in Sofia. A non-profit organization, registered as a charity in New York State, ``dedicated to facilitating academic research in Bulgaria and collaboration between scholars from North America and former communist countries in Southeast Europe (Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, The Union of Serbia and Montenegro). The main focus of the Center will be research in the humanities and social sciences (in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art history, epigraphy, history, philology, among others), from prehistoric antiquity to the modern period.''

Arctic Wolf Pups at Play
I figured that given its size, this file didn't have enough images.

[Four arctic wolf pups playing]
(Above image from <http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/multimedia/images/gif/a/arcwolf4.gif>.)

Norman Rockwell advised, if a picture isn't going well, to add a dog. If it's still not going well, add two. I count four pups above. For more on Rockwell, see the NYC entry.

Of course, of course -- there's a site.

ARD
Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition. A Pennsylvania program in place since 1972 that amounts to a sugar-coated nolo contendere plea agreement.

After charges of non-violent crimes are brought against someone without a previous criminal record, the prosecution may at its discretion ask the court to consider ARD, and the court at its discretion may offer the defense the opportunity to initiate ARD proceedings. If the defense accepts, a mostly closed hearing is held in which prosecution must and defense and any victim or victims may make presentations, after which the court may choose to offer what amounts to a plea bargain arrangement including up to two years of probation, restitution to victims and compensation for administrative costs (no fines or imprisonment).

The court may choose not to offer ARD (this decision may not be appealed) or the defendant may refuse the terms. In either case, the legal process continues normally (as if there had been no ARD hearing). The defendant's testimony in the ARD proceeding ``is immunized'' in the usual expression -- i.e., the testimony cannot be used against the defendant in another trial. You may feel it is the defendant and not the testimony that is immunized, but you'll have to take that up with the competent (?) authorities. (In this case at least, I didn't make up the usage, I just reported it.) The one exception to this rule on defendants' testimony is that it can be introduced into evidence in a prosecution based on the falsity of the information supplied.

If probation is violated, prosecution may proceed on the original charges. (In accepting an ARD, the defendant waives protection under statutes of limitations and relevant rights to speedy trial.)

Upon successful completion of the probationary period, the original charges are expected to be expunged, but the prosecution has an opportunity to object. Even though the charges are ``expunged,'' the computation of a sentence on any subsequent conviction can construe acceptance into an ARD as an admission of guilt...

Here's an unofficial link to the official rules of this game.

ARD
Acoustic Resonance Densitometry.










	
Sorry about the interruption. I had a sesame seed stuck to my elbow.
ARD
Advanced Research and Development. As opposed to retarded R & D, I suppose.

ARD
Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstallten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. `Association of Public Broadcasting Stations of the Federal Republic of Germany.' (In case you're wondering, öffentlich means `public,' and öffentlich-rechtlichen means `according to public law.' It does seem a bit roundabout.)

An amalgamation of broadcasting stations of the German states (Länder). Since 1954 it has run the Erstes Deutsches Fernsehen, `First German Television.'

[Phone icon]

ARD
Automatic RingDown. If one phone goes off hook, the other rings. Functions like an intercom system, but unlike typical intercom systems set up within a building or work site, ARD operates across the phone system.

ARDC
Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission.

ARDE
Aspect-Ratio-Dependent Etching.

ARDEC
(U. S. Army) Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center. Located at Picatinny Arsenal, NJ.

ARDF
Alternatives Research & Development Foundation. Affiliated with the AAVS; seeks alternatives to animal-based research. For a bit on their activities, see this AWA entry.

[column] It was originally (before 1994) called the Demeter Fund. Can you guess why?

ARDS
Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

ARE
Acronym-Rich Environment. Probably either the military or a logomachic computer game.

ARE
All-Routes Explorer.

ARE
An old (1970's) telecommunications switching system from Ericsson, long ago superseded by AXE (q.v.).

are
A square decameter.

AREA
Association of Records Executives and Administrators. A non-profit organization chartered to facilitate the exchange of records management information, founded in November 1955 by twelve records administrators from various New York corporations and NYC municipal agencies. Merged in 1975 with a similar organization named ARMA, to create a new organization called ARMA.

I suppose, given the era, you could be forgiven for thinking that these were vinyl records. But they weren't. These were data records. Information and even information technology existed before computers, and for a while longer largely independently of computers! (Sex, on the other hand, is a different story; see the 1963 entry.)

area
Two-dimensional generalization of the length concept. For even more heavy-duty intellectual heavy lifting, see the ramo entry.

[Phone icon]

area code
First three digits of full US telephone number following country code. Always changing. You can convert between city/region/country and corresponding city/area/country codes using this utility.

ARES
American Real Estate Society. ``... a society of and for high-level practicing professionals [pretentiously described, elsewhere on the page, as thought leaders] and real estate professors at colleges and universities throughout the United States and the world.'' I like that phrasing. I'd like it even more in the form ``the United States and also the world.''

ares
Plural of the SI unit of area. One are equals 100 square meters. The unit is used throughout the United States and the world, except for the US.

Arethusa
ARETHUSA. This is the code used by APh for the magazine whose name is Arethusa. After all, I wouldn't pollute this glossary with entries for nonabbreviations. If I started doing that, there'd be no end of it.

You noticed that the code is the same as the name! Very good: this is true.

AREUEA
American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association. This isn't the sort of acronym you have to fight for exclusive use of. Trying to come up with a pronunciation of that acronym reminds me of that horse-land Gulliver visited last -- the land of the Houyhnhnms. My Anglophile Modern Satire teacher at Westfield Senior High (sorry -- it was a couple of years ago -- I forgot her name) used to pronounce that win-ums. I can't help with AREUEA. Gulliver also met the Yahoos there.

AREUEA publishes REE and organizes three conferences a year.

ARFID
Asian-Pacific Research Foundation for Infectious Diseases. In Seoul.

ARG
Archiv für Religionsgeschichte. German title that might've been `Annals of the History of Religion' in English. ISSN 1436-3038. Ed. by Jan Assmann, et al.

``In the last decades interest in the history of religions of the ancient world has grown because of both the discovery of new evidence and new theoretical approaches resulting from closer contact with other disciplines. This growing interest has called in 1999 for a new journal that will bring the various approaches to bear on the primary evidence, and thus highlight the various points of philology, history, archaeology, iconology, historical anthropology and social sciences. In addressing this need, the Archiv für Religionsgeschichte will continue the high standards of the once leading Archiv für Religionswissenschaften, while the change in title reflects the historical focus of the new periodical [volumes numbered from 1 in 1999]. There will be room for broad interdisciplinary thematic discussions by various authors as well as for detailed interpretations of individual, or groups of, documents and pieces of other evidence. The geographical emphasis will comprehend the ancient Mediterranean Basin and the ancient Middle East extending to India and Iran.''

ARG
Argument. The variable to be mapped.

Argelia
Spanish for Algeria. Algiers is Argel. The adjective and gentilicial forms are argelino and argelina (male and female). Cf. Algeria, algeriana.

This is probably as good a place as any to mention three related consonants l, r, and rr of Spanish. The lateral consonant l is close enough to English l, but neither of the vibrants is particularly like an American or English r. The double-r represents a trill sound, which is made by gargling against the roof of the mouth (the front half of the palate). The same sound is written with a single r when it occurs at the beginning of a syllable. In all other cases (possibly neglecting foreign loans whose spelling has not yet naturalized), a single r is pronounced as a flap consonant, by tapping the tip of the tongue against the back of the gums of the upper front teeth. The same sounds and pretty much the same spellings are used in other Spanish languages and in Basque. (Note, however, that ll represents diffent sounds, even differing among dialects of Castilian. Also, in Basque and the neighboring Romance languages of Gascon and Aragonese, a vibrant cannot occur at the beginning of a word.)

Now that the consonants have been introduced, we can examine an interesting phenomenon that seems to distinguish Castilian from most other European languages, which is frequent exchange of r and l consonants. Well, we can do it, anyway. And we will! But later.

Argh
:-[.

[Football icon]

Argonaut
A member of the CFL team in Toronto. The team started out as a rowing club, and the name was chosen in reference to the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts. The original Argonauts were heroes and demigods. I don't know much about the original Argonauts of Toronto, but they apparently decided that they needed an off-season activity as well, and went into rugby, which evolved into Canadian football.

Inventing new sports seems to be a major Canadian winter activity. Dr. James Naismith (born in Almonte, Ontario) invented basketball in 1891. Read more about it here.

For the Toronto Argonauts, finding something to do in the Winter was probably healthy. Jason offers a monitory example. After he came home, he put the Argo in dry-dock. He would loll away the time under its prow thinking back on his exploits as a young prince, while the Argo just rotted away. One day the prow rotted clear through and fell on his head. Having big lumber fall on your head is always bad for your health, and in the event old Jason died. That's how I remember it, anyway. I may come back and fix it if I remembered it wrong, but I may not. You know, Greek myths usually were available in multiple versions. The standard version of this story is the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes.

I suppose if you want to be extra safe in this kind of situation, the thing to do is take up keeping your ship in good repair as a winter activity. More about the ship of Theseus some other time.

argonaut
An eight-armed cephalopod closely related to the octopus. The animals exhibit a high degree of sexual dimorphism. The males are about one tenth the size of the females (which range in length from 5 to 30 cm). One of the arms of a male is apparently an independently targetable reproductive organ. During mating this ``hectocotyle'' detaches from the male; it has independent power of locomotion and is believed to seek out a female. The hectocotyle fertilizes the eggs of a single female and remains in her body.

[column] In the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts, Jason flees with the fleece, on board the Argo with Medea and her brother. King Aeëtes, Medea's father and erstwhile owner of that golden fleece, is in hot pursuit and gaining. Medea kills her brother Absyrtus and cuts his body in pieces. (She throws them overboard in a successful ploy to escape their father, who slows down to retrieve them. Winning races by dropping things the faster racer will slow down for is a recurring theme in Greek myth, as is the murder of close relatives, so this plot device is only to be expected. What I don't understand is, why did the pieces float? My working hypothesis: Absyrtus was fat.)

The phrase ``independently targetable'' occurs in the expansion of MIRV. There the multiple re-entry vehicles that are targetable independently of each other. Between spawning seasons, a male argonaut regenerates a hectocotyle. Each year the spawning cycle begins after the females secrete a translucent, paper-thin spiral shell (not connected to the female's body) that serves as an egg case. This shell gives rise to an alternate name for the argonaut: ``paper nautilus.'' Six species of argonaut are known, comprising the genus Argonauta.

Another eight-legged species with much larger females than males is the black widow. The male is able to approach and inseminate the female by a mating ritual that temporarily suspends the female's voracious and cannibalistic behavior, but he usually doesn't get a chance to mate twice, since the female usually snaps out of it before he makes good his escape. As a male, I can see the advantages of the argonaut solution.

You know about the Lemnian women, right?

Among insects, the praying mantis is famous for behavior that resembles both of the above examples in some respects. The female praying mantis is somewhat larger than the male. As with black widows, the mating process is death for the male and meal for the female. However, as in the case of the argonaut, the fertilization of eggs is performed by an organ separated from its head. It turns out that the male does not really start thrusting until the female has started eating his head off. Once his head is completely off, the decapitated male's pene continues to fertilize the female's eggs.

The praying mantis male has a single pene, but many insect species have paired hemipenes. The penes and hemipenes of various insect species' males fit into the females rather intricately, rather like a key in a lock. Pene differentiation thus represents an important mechanism of speciation. Correspondingly, the careful examination of penes is an important taxonomic, uh, tool. Vladimir Nabokov, most famous today as the author of Lolita, was an avid and expert entomologist who specialized in certain kind of butterfly (I forgot the name, okay?). He spent hours tracking down these butterflies, capturing them, and cutting them open to examine the penes. His day job was literature professor.

The Ancient Greeks apparently never noticed that many insects have hemipenes. They did notice that swans have them, and thus regarded the swan as an especially sexually endowed animal.

argon ion
Ar+ ion laser. Continuous mode 488 and 541 nm.

argumentum ad verecundiam
Latin, `argument from modesty.' Appeal to authority. A fallacy in formal logic, a ubiquity in ordinary discourse.

Often the medieval form ``vericundiam'' is encountered.

ARHP
Association of Reproductive Health Professionals. ``The Association of Reproductive Health Professionals (ARHP), founded in 1963, is an international nonprofit association of health care providers, researchers, and educators.''

ARHP
Association of Rheumatology Health Professionals. The ACR hosts some links to nonexistent pages for its fraternal organization.

ARHRI
Australian Rural Health Research Institute.

ARI
Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute.

Ari
Aries. Official IAU abbreviation for the constellation.

Ari
ARIstotle (i.e., Aristoteles) is a popular Greek given name, and Ari is a popular nickname form of it. Aristotle Onassis was known as Ari. Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of JFK, married Ari Onassis and was known as Jackie O. Ari's daughter was known as a poor little rich girl.

ARi
Arthritis and Rheumatism International. ``International''! It seems that arthritis and rheumatism are on the move.

Actually, the word rheumatism is ultimately derived from the Ancient Greek root rheu-, to flow, as in the famous assertion of Heraclitus that panta rhei (`everything flows'). The noun rheûma referred to a `flow' or `stream,' and the verb rheumatízein `to snuffle,' taken into medical Latin as rheumatisare. The archaic word rheum in English, and cognates in Romance, meant `mucus secretion' specifically, or a liquid ``defluxion'' in general. The association of various diseases with rheum was made before the development of modern medicine; it was based partly on symptomatology and largely on ignorance.

ARI
Autism Research Institute.

ARI
Automatic (hotel or motel) Room Identification.

ARIAD
Allison Research Index of Art and Design.

ARIBa
Association Représentative des Initiatives en Basse-vision.

ARIES
Angle-Resolved Ion and Electron Spectroscopy.

ARIMA
AutoRegressive-Integrated-Moving-Average. Cf. ARMA. I'll let you know as soon as I find out if there's really any difference.

ARIST
Agence Régionale d'Information Scientifique et Technique.

ARIST
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.

[column]

Arist.
ARISTotle. (Aristoteles was the nominative form in Greek.) This (Arist.) is the established conventional abbreviation used by classicists (writing in English). Standing alone to represent an author, it only means Aristotle and not Aristophanes (the Aristophanes, abbreviated Ar.). When Arist. is followed by another abbreviation in italics, that is the abbreviation of the Latin title of one of his works. If Arist. is followed by another abbreviation that is not italicized, then the two abbreviated words probably stand for somebody else who was also an Aristophanes.

Mnemonic for the abbreviation: Aristophanes came first and grabbed the shorter approximation. Heck, even Aristocles came first and had shorter abbreviations (of his nickname Plato, no matter where you cut it off).

Aristarchus
Remember, you can't spell Aristarchus without star.

ARISTOTELES
Applications and Research Involving Space Technologies Observing The Earth's field from Low-Earth-orbit Satellites.

This acronym was not contrived; they just worked on getting a compact but accurate description, and it happened to work out to this acronym. Sure. (British: Right.)

Frequently misspelled ARISTOTLES.

In the movie Accident (1967), Charley (Stanley Baker) reads from a learned journal...

A statistical analysis of sexual intercourse at Kolenzo University, Milwaukee showed... that
  • 70% did it in the evening,
  • 29.9% between 2 and 4 in the afternoon and
  • 0.1% during a lecture on Aristotle.

Aged Professor: I'm surprised to hear that Aristotle is on the syllabus in the State of Wisconsin.

ARISTOTLE 2000
An IBM trademark. If you think that's funny, consider the FAA. But wait, there's more: Aristotle Internet Access gives you electronic access to fresh organic food from Arkansas from anywhere on the planet. And from NASA...

...um, I don't know. I must have had some ironic usurpation of namespace territory in mind when I wrote the entry, but I forgot what it was supposed to have been and it doesn't -- oh wait! It had been misalphabetized. See ARISTOTELES. Sorry. Have a nice day.

ARJ
An MS-DOS archive program.

ARL
Adjusted Ring Length. In a one-way communication-ring topology, the maximum distance a signal has to travel. Easy to compute: take the ``circumference'' of the ring (i.e., the sum of the lengths of the cables between adjacent nodes) and subtract the length of the shortest cable. (The subtraction is made because messages don't go all the way around, since a node talks to itself directly rather than around the ring.)

ARL
Army Research Laboratory.

ARL
Association of Research Libraries.

The ARL Latin Americanist Research Resources Project maintains a Latin American Periodicals Tables of Contents.

ARL
Australian Rugby League.

ARLIS
Alaska Resources Library and Information Services.

ARLIS/NA
ARt LIbraries Society of North America.

ARLL
Advanced Run-Length Limited (encoding).

ARLNA
Association of Record Librarians of North America. Established in 1928 by the American College of Surgeons, to ``elevate the standards of clinical records in hospitals and other medical institutions.''

The organization has undergone many name changes since 1928, and its mission does not appear to have changed substantively. They'll probably keep changing the name, so it seems more practical to make this the organization's main entry. In 1938 it became the American Association of Medical Record Librarians (AAMRL), which was apparently deemed appropriate because the membership was mostly American. Duh. In 1970 it became the American Medical Record Association (AMRA). because it had been over three decades since the previous name change, and anyway ``librarians'' sounds kind of dowdy. In 1991 it became CURSE THIS MAC! EVEN CUTTING-AND-PASTING IS DIFFICULT!

Take a deep breath... count to ten...

American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), because ``information'' is sexier than ``records.'' Nobody noticed the name change, and they kept writing things like ``ART (accredited by AMRA).'' Therefore, to improve name recognition and, uh, to reflect advances in the field and, let's face it, to stick it to em', they also changed the names of the accredited credentials ART and RRA. To be fair, ARLNA and its successors have a habit of changing credential names as well as the organization's name. It seems that RRA previously replaced RRL, though not so cleanly as RHIA replaced RRA.

ARLPI
Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative.

[column]

ARLT
The (UK) Association for Latin Teaching. Founded in 1911 as the Association for the Reform of Latin Teaching, and continued to use the original acronym after changing its name.

ARM
Acorn RISC Machine.

ARM
Adjustable-Rate Mortgage. I've heard this pronounced like the ordinary word arm in a radio ad.

ARM
Advanced RISC (q.v.) Machines. A partnership of Cirrus Logic, GEC Plessey, Sharp, TI, and VLSI Technology.

They make a big point of the fact that the large size of RISC code has been off-putting, so they've developed different instruction sets to make RISC code denser.

ARM
Anhysteretic ReManence.

ARM
Anti-Radiation Missile.

ARM
Asynchronous Response Mode.

ARM
Automotive Recyclers of Minnesota. ``Automotive Recyclers of Minnesota is an association of approximately 100 automotive recyclers in Minnesota all of whom supply used auto parts to individuals, collision repairers, insurance repairers, and other out of state recyclers. Most auto parts are warranted and can be shipped anywhere.'' Huh. And I thought all they did was pull off the tires and sell the rest for scrap.

arm
German adjective meaning `poor.' (Poverty poor. Poor in the sense of impecunious. Arm you would give alms for.)

ARMA
American Records Management Association. Became ARMA (q.v.) in a 1975 merger.

ARMA
American Rock Mechanics Association. Its domain name is ARMA rocks dot org.

ARMA
Annular Ring Microstrip Antenna. The word annular comes from the Latin word annulus, which means `ring.' To bend over backwards to be fair to this coinage, annulus in conventional English usage refers more specifically to the area between two concentric circles on a flat surface, and that's the sort of ring an ARMA is usually made of.

ARMA
Asphalt Roofing Manufacturers Association.

ARMA
Association for Renaissance Martial Arts. This was formerly known as the Historical Armed Combat Association. Perhaps this was not a smooth name change, from the acronymic point of view, but it seems more precise, and it is admirable for another reason.

ARMA
Association of Records Managers and Administrators. Just for the record, let me point out that it was created in the 1975 merger of the Association of Records Executives and Administrators (AREA) and the American Records Management Association (ARMA).

Back when I was in graduate school, we all admired Steve (doing a mathematical physics dissertation with Wightman) for the smooth operator he was. I think perhaps it was Marvin (Applied Math program) who first said that ``when Steve takes a step, eight derivatives go to zero.'' Anyway, I just want to award a Stevie to ARMA for its smooth name change; I'm sure it has set some kind of record for smoothness. Come to think of it, another kinda ARMA is mathematically smooth by design.

Nowadays, ARMA suppresses the expansion of its acronym altogether and identifies itself as ``ARMA International: The Association for Information Management Professionals.'' See the sealed acronym entry for other examples of such name evolutions.

ARMA
AutoRegressive-Moving-Average. Cf. ARIMA. I'll let you know as soon as I find out if there's really any difference.

arma
Spanish and Latin word for `weapon.'

ARN
Ácido ribonucleico. Spanish for `RNA,' q.v. Cf. ADN.

ARN
Association of Rehabilitation Nurses.

ARNA
American Radiological Nurses Association. From the look of the organization's logo, it seems they had their very own spirograph.

ARND
Alcohol-Related Neurodevelopmental Disorders. I suppose childhood alcoholism could be a cause of ARND, but the most common ARND are associated with FAS. In consequence, the ARND component of FAS, written FAS/ARND, is practically a synonym of ARND.

ARNES
Academic and Research Network of Slovenia. (Slovenia is .si.)

ARNG
(US) ARmy National Guard. The R disambiguates this from the Air National Guard.

Arnim
My apologies to the record managers and the Slovenian researchers and all, but we really seem to be in the horse latitudes of this glossary. Why not visit the exciting SN entry, which eventually gets around to saying something indecisive about Arnim? (If you think that's an equivocal recommendation, you should hear Gary urging me to meet some woman he thinks I might conceivably not be entirely repulsed by, and might eventually even find interesting -- I mean, if looks don't matter.)

Arnista
A political ally of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

ARNN
Association of Registered Nurses of Newfoundland. Now ARNNL.

ARNNL
Association of Registered Nurses of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Arnold Encyclopedia
Now look, traveling back in time, governating by recall and initiative, and amending the US constitution so you can be president, okay, but somewhere a line must be drawn! Hmmm. Okay, that's The Arnold Encyclopedia of Real Estate, by Alvin L. Arnold. (Second Edition with the assistance of Eric Stevenson, Marshall E. Tracht, and Paul D. Lapides, published in 1993 by John Wiley and Sons, Inc.) Gotta admire anyone who writes a major reference work all by himself.

ARO
Aerial Refueling Operator.

ARO
Airport Reservation Office. N.B.: Airport, not airline. The office within the FAA's ATCSCC that allocates takeoff and landing slots at high-density traffic US airports. As of 2001, four are designated high-density traffic airports: JFK, La Guardia (LGA), O'Hare (ORD), and Ronald Reagan Washington National. The ARO also requires slot reservations via STMP for airports with temporary above-normal traffic, typically caused by sporting events.

ARO
Army Research Office. The Army OXR.

ARO
Association for Research in Otolaryngology.

-aro
Post-classical Greek borrowed so many verbs from Latin that Modern Greek has an verb class for them, with the infinitives ending in -aro, evidently reflecting the largest class of Latin verbs (whose infinitives end in -are). The one verb class absorbed loan verbs from all four verb classes of Latin.

A similar thing happened in German with French verbs. The four Latin verb classes collapsed to three in French. [This happened generally in Western Romance languages: two of the verb classes had infinitives ending in -ere and were distinguishable by the length (the vowel quantity) of the prerhotic e. As the length distinction ceased to be observed, the distinction became hard to maintain.] In French the noninitial a's shifted to e's (there must be some further condition, possibly to do with stress, but I'm not familiar with the details) and -er became the infinitive ending of the largest verb class. When French verbs were adopted into German in large numbers, they all received infinitive endings -ieren. From that point conjugation is straightforward, since the patterns of weak conjugation simply involve replacing the -en systematically with other endings.

Despite widespread iotization of Greek vowels, the alpha in the -aro ending still resembles the a in the original Latin -are. In terms of modern pronunciations on the other hand, the ier of the German verb ending -ieren most closely resembles the French verb ending -ir and not the more common -er. I can't explain that. (Actually, I can explain it, but not with any confidence that I am correct.)

aro
Spanish, `ring.' Perhaps more of a hoop. A ring worn on a finger is un anillo. Anillo comes from the Latin anellus, which was a diminutive form of anus (with a long a). Anulus was another diminutive form and also meant `finger ring.' (A medieval spelling error led to the modern English spelling annulus.) The learned dictionaries I've consulted disagree somewhat on the original sense or the semantic evolution of anus. In classical Latin it referred to both `anus' and occasionally to anything rounded, including a ring. It seems to have evolved from a word for `seat' generally, with `anus' as well as `hemorrhoids' evolving as metonymic senses. There evidently to be some disagreement whether the more general `round thing' sense represents a separate word with its own etymology, or a sense evolution from, say `[round] butt.' The etymology of aro (the, ah, subject of this entry) is less clear.

AROM
Active Range Of Motion. A biokinetics term. Typically, the angle through which a joint can be turned by the person whose body the joint is part of (as opposed to something or someone other than that person, in which case we're dealing with PROM).

AROS
Amateur Radio Observation Service.

aros
Plural of the Spanish word aro. That's right, I'm inflating the lemma count.

ARO-W
Army Research Office - Washington.

ARP
Address Resolution Protocol. Defined in RFC 826. Protocol used to bind an IP address to Ethernet/802.2 address.

ARP
American Registry of Pathology. Getting sick? Register so your friends will know what to give to celebrate your convalescence!

ARPA
Advanced Research Projects Agency (of the U.S. DoD). Same as DARPA. DARPA is the new name, DARPA was the old name. It was ARPA in between.

.arpa
(Domain code for) Ye Olde Style ARPAnet, funded by ARPA.

ARPA
Atlantic Region Philosophers Association. ``[F]ormed in 1970 to foster research and scholarship within the philosophical community in Atlantic Canada. Its main function is to hold an annual conference where Atlantic Canadian philosophers (and visitors) can discuss their work.''

ARPA-E
Advanced Research Projects Agency -- Energy. A research funding agency of the U.S. DoE.

ARPANET
The original of the internet. Intended for military application.

ARPANSA
Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency.

ARPES
Angle-Resolved PhotoEmission Spectroscopy.

ARPS
Advanced Radioisotope Power System. Fancy RTG of the future. Radioisotope power sources have been used for remote locations on earth, but generally speaking, the main application for which they are an attractive option is space exploration. A number of radioisotopes offer different power densities and half-lives, but NASA has standardized on plutonium oxide (in GPHS modules -- extensively tested explosion- and earthfall-tested containers).

RTG's have traditionally used cascaded semiconductor thermoelectric cells. ARPS's differ from current RTG's primarily in the method to be used in converting heat to energy. At STAIF 2003, Mohamed S. El-Genk of UNM presented ``Energy Conversion Options for Advanced Radioisotope Power Systems'' [published in AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 654, pp. 368-375 (2003)]. Options considered included improved versions of current STE's, Alkali-Metal Thermal-to-Electric Conversion (Na-AMTEC and K-AMTEC), and Free-Piston Stirling Engines (FPSE's). Specific power worked out to between 4 and 10 We/kg for all options.

ARPS
Automated Routing and Permitting System.

ARPT
AiRPorT.

ARPU
Average Revenue Per User.

ARQ
Automat{ ic | ed } Repeat reQuest. ARQ protocols use feedback to request re-transmission of damaged (and consequently erased) packets.

ARR
Academy of Radiology Research. From the logo, it looks like their radiology-standard spirograph is broken.

ARR
ARRival.

ARRA
Americans for Responsible Recreational Access. ``[F]ormed to ensure that outdoor enthusiasts can keep their right to enjoy and use public lands and waterways.'' Cf. BRC.

arreglieren
Infinitive of a German verb meaning `fix,' borrowed from the Spanish verb of the same meaning with infinitive arreglar. I didn't find it in any of the few dictionaries I checked, and googling suggests that the lemma is rare and possibly restricted to Spanish-German bilinguals, but my mom encountered it in a context with no apparent Spanish-language connection.

Arrhenius plot
A plot of the log of some quantity against inverse temperature. The slope (for an activated process) is minus the activation energy. Vide activated.

Arrhenius was an important Swedish chemist who early in the twentieth century wanted the then-new developments in atomic science to be a part of the domain of chemistry rather than of physics. It is partly due to his influence that Ernest Rutherford, who inferred the nature of the nuclear atom (electrons spread out around a small positively charged nucleus) from the results of Geiger and Marsden's scattering experiments, was awarded the Nobel prize in Chemistry instead of Physics. Rutherford used to say ``All science is either physics or stamp collecting.'' He described electrons in the nuclear model of an atom as being ``like a few flies in a cathedral.'' Rutherford made some early progress in radio transmission (``wireless communication'') but gave it up when someone told his advisor J. J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron) that prospects for commercialization were poor. Lord Kelvin (yes, the Kelvin of the temperature scale, and too many accomplishments to list) tried and failed to get financial backing for Rutherford's experiments. Guglielmo Marconi also did not have outside funding. At age twenty-one he made the necessary breakthroughs working in a laboratory he set up in his parents' home.

arriba
Spanish adverb meaning `above.' Used with general prepositions. For example, arriba de is equivalent to the prepositionals `above, over, on top of'; para arriba means `upward.' (For more on the adverbial use, see pata.)

Arriba is also a form of the verb arribar (`arrive'). Primarily, it is the third-person singular present-tense form.

As an exclamation, ¡arriba! can be roughly equivalent to ¡viva! Coincidentally, it seems about equally awkward to translate ¡Viva Zapata! as `Live Zapata!' and `Up with Zapata!'

The word is best known in English as the characteristic exclamation of a Mexican cartoon rodent, I think it was. The closest this comes to any common usage I know of is ¡arriba! as the exhortation `rise!' (or `drink up!').

Interestingly, the word originates from the Latin ad ripam, meaning `to the border.' This origin is clearer from obsolete senses of the Spanish word: `forward, further on, to the opposite side.' ``Onward and upward,'' as they say.

ARRL
American Radio Relay League.

ARRN
Amateur Radio Repeater Network.

arrobe
Le caractère arrobe is French for `the at sign.' To wit: @.

ARROW
Anti-Resonant Reflecting Optical Waveguide.

arroz
Spanish, `rice.' But not `Spanish rice' -- that'd be paella.

ARRS
American Roentgen Ray Society. Roentgen discovered X-rays. Please don't mind the hyphenation in this entry; I'm following inconsistent but established convention. ARRS publishes the AJR.

ARRS
Animal Rights Resource Site.

ARS
During 2002, and as late as March 12, 2003, the World Health Organization (WHO) used the expression ``acute respiratory syndrome'' in the generic sense, referring to various apparently unrelated disease outbreaks. The last outbreak to be so designated was later called SARS. If the generic term had been abbreviated as an acronym, it should have been written ARS. This gives a whole new meaning to the Hippocratic aphorism -- ARS longa, vita brevis. (That's Horace's version, I think, though the translation of the original techne macro, bios brachis is pretty much a no-brainer.)

I think it's been suggested that I give a version in English. Okay: ``The art is long [there is much to know], life is short.''

ARS
Agricultural Research Service (of the US Department of Agriculture -- USDA).

a.r.s., ARS
alt.religion.scientology. A Usenet newsgroup. Subscribers are generally unsympathetic to that religion, so possibly it would have been helpful simply to call it <alt.fan.religion.scientology>, but if you think so then I kindly ask you to take the discussion to the <news.groups> newsgroup or whatever.

ARS
American Radium Society. ``Founded in 1916, the American Radium Society is the oldest society devoted to the study and treatment of cancer. As a multidisciplinary organization, members include, radiation oncologists, surgical oncologists, gynecological oncologists and, medical oncologists. As its objectives the Society promotes the study of cancer in all of its aspects; encourages liaison among the various medical specialists and allied scientists concerned with the treatment of cancer and to continues scientific study of the treatment of the cancer patient through its annual meeting and educational publications.'' If they changed the name, it would save a lot of explanation.

ARS
American Rhinologic Society. With a name like that, who needs a set-up? Heck, even the punch line is superfluous. ``The American Rhinologic Society is the world's largest physician organization whose mission focuses upon the medical and surgical treatment of patients with diseases of the nose and paranasal sinuses. Patient care, research and education are integral to the ARS mission.''

ARS
International currency symbol for the Argentine currency, which as of this writing (2005) is the peso. The letter S is used because even though the name is the same, the name has changed. That is, ARP was taken, since it refers to an earlier Argentine currency.

For most of the twentieth century, one or another peso has been the national currency of Argentina. In 1881 a unified currency system was first established in the country, and the official name of the currency reflected that: ``peso moneda nacional.'' The symbol used for it in Argentina was the $ sign. This peso lasted until 1969, when due to inflation, it was decided to replace it with a new peso. One of the compelling arguments for the change seems to have been that peso amounts had become too large for calculating machines. I suppose that's the last time that argument was convincing.

The new currency was called -- so help me -- ``peso ley 18.188'' (`Law 18,188 peso'). They should consider revaluing the laws some day. A factor of ten and that old law would be an easier-to-handle 1,818.8. Anyway, the new money was popularly known as the ``peso ley,'' and in writing, prices stated in terms of the new pesos were indicated with $L in front. Amounts in the older currency came to be indicated by m$n and M$n. I'll try to find out what the m and n stood for. Best guess for now: moneda nacional.

(In all these cases, after a transitional period it becomes unnecessary to qualify the currency symbol to distinguish new and old. However, Argentina has spent much of the time since 1969 in transitional periods.) The new-currency/old-currency exchange in 1969, like all subsequent exchanges, was by a convenient factor of a power of ten: $L 1 = m$n 100. Little did they know.

Inflation got worse. The peso ley entered circulation in 1970, former dictator Juan Perón was elected president with an overwhelming majority in 1973, and the inflation rate actually began to come down. He died on July 1, 1974, and was succeeded by the vice president, Isabela Perón (his third wife). By 1975, inflation was again high. I'm not saying everything else was hunky-dory, you understand, but that's just not the focus of this entry. There was a spate of foreign-executive kidnappings for ransom which helped fund a growing leftist (Montonero) insurgency, and generally the economy was a shambles. The coup came in 1976.

Hyperinflation has some weird expansionary benefits. When my folks visited in 1979 or 1980, building construction in Buenos Aires was going on round-the-clock. Overtime was expensive, sure, but at a certain point that became less important than the fact that slower construction meant later and therefore more expensive outlays. Similarly, people spent money as fast as they could, because it was self-immolating a hole in their pockets. Once at a clothing store, my mother was asked by another customer to translate the number on a price tag into words, the same way science popularizations explain exponential notation with strings of repeated ``million.'' My dad was talking with his friend David when his son came in and asked for a few million to put gas in the car. (He must have been talking in terms of the old currency, the way people will persist in doing. That's why you need a second devaluation to make the first one stick.) Inflation was at 600% per year in 1981. Or something like that. When the numbers get that big they get hard to estimate. The ``breadbasket'' distorts, you know? In December, the junta leadership was reshuffled, and Army General Galtieri was named president.

I was TA-ing Sophomore Physics Lab one early April day in 1982 when an Argentine friend excitedly brought me the happy news of the Falklands invasion. Happy him, anyway, and happy most Argentines, for a little while. When I asked why the invasion was a good thing, he gave me an answer that in its cheerful cynicism was perfectly Argentine: that the invasion was a brilliant stroke, because it would unite the people behind the government. This it did, and it might have continued to do so, had British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher been the pewter lady my friend and the generals mistook her for. (To adapt Chaucer's phrase quoted at the gold standard entry: ``if iren ruste, what shal sterling do?'')

So Britain recaptured the Falklands, General Galtieri was replaced, and that year Argentine inflation was even worse. Argentina's central bank (called El Banco Central de la República Argentina -- I mean, what did you expect?) for the first time issued notes in denominations of one million pesos ($L 1.000.000). In 1983, the ``peso argentino'' was introduced: $A 1 = $L 10.000 (that's ten-thousand-to-one, you unnerstan'?). In December 1983, there were free elections and Raul Alfonsín (Radical Party) was elected president.

In 1985, Alfonsín introduced the ``austral,'' A 1 = $A 1.000 -- a factor of 1000 in two years' time. What the heck, by now anybody could buy a cheap calculator for a few grand. (By the way, the currency symbol was a capital letter A with the horizontal line doubled.) An ambitious economic program was introduced along with it. I can't remember the details, but it must have been one of those new-cash-register-and-typewriter-sales-driven expansions.

The inflation fever finally broke in 1989, and in 1991 another peso was introduced: the nuevo peso. (Another office-equipment boom!) It was also known as the peso convertible because the government pegged its exchange rate at one nuevo peso per US dollar. So the new peso symbol was $, and that was unambiguous for practical purposes since prices were the same whether quoted in pesos or in dollars. As usual, the new currency involved a devaluation: $ 1 = A 10.000. I get all tingly when I see things like that, and wonder about the vapor pressure of gold.

The convertibility regime held until the economic collapse of early 2001, and since then the peso has floated at between three and four to the dollar. (It's still the same old nuevo peso, `new peso,' but after ten years it's clear enough which peso is meant that one needn't state the qualifier.) The symbol U$S is now used to indicate US dollars as opposed to pesos ($).

It's probably worth mentioning an element of continuity through the currency changes. Paper money in Argentina, as in many other countries, is color-coded. Sort of like casino chips -- another risky investment. (Some countries also use different-size bills. That would just confuse my wallet.) In Argentina, one doesn't read the printed denomination any more than one reads the embossed number on a coin. So when the currency changes, the same combination of colored bills buys something whose price hasn't changed since the conversion, even though a few zeroes go by the board.

In case you had trouble keeping your eye on the ball, 1013 of the pre-1969 pesos buy one (1, or 100) new peso. If you bought long-term savings bonds, I imagine you're out of luck. Then again, I just checked and saw an ordinary 5-centavo (m$n0,05) bill from 1891 at auction, bid up to $22.99 so far, or about U$S7, for an exchange rate of 10-2.66 m$n per $1. Hey, that makes sense too: the 1891 m$n was a strong currency!

ISO 4217, the international currency-symbol standard, was established in 1978, and over the period since then Argentina has had four distinct currencies. Each new currency needs a different letter. If the current new-currency introduction rate holds, they've got centuries to go before they run out of alphabet.

ARS
Arizona Revised Statutes.

ARS
Automatic Route Selection.

ARSA
Airport Radar Service Area.

ARSCC
ARS Central Committee. Facetious name for secret nonorganization of the nefarious enemies of the Co$.

Arsch
German noun (male) meaning `arse.'

arse
A British word that allows one to distinguish between a part of the body and an animal called an ass (to say nothing of ass). Because most British accents have a weak arr, however, the distinction in speech is noted mostly in the vowel.

ARSI
Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative. Funded by the NSF. See also AMSP.

``Empowering Appalachian Children with Mathematics and Science.''

Sounds like the hook for a really bad horror flick. Barefoot children in sun-bleached rags do the zombie gait while growling in preternaturally low voices --

DI - VIDE AN' CON - QUER !

AL - GO - RI - PHM !

RES - PI - RA - TION AN' DE CRAB CY - CLE !

ARSR
Air Route Surveillance Radar. Radar operated by an ARTCC, used to track flights outside the immediate area of an airport (i.e., between terminal areas). Compare the complementary ASR.

ARSTAF
ARmy STAFf.

ART
Accredited Record Technician. Accredited by AMRA, later called AHIMA. The new improved name for this is RHIT (accredited by AHIMA or whoever).

ART
Adaptive Resonance Theory. I don't think this is all about adjusting your Chi. Maybe gamma or Q. (Come to think of it, in the current Romanization of Chinese, Q represents a ch sound.)

ART
American Repertory Theatre. On Harvard Square.

ART
Anti-Retroviral-drug Therapy.

ART
Assist{ive|ed} Reproductive Technology. Babies without sex; immaculate conception without divinity. Viz. IUI, IVF, GIFT, and ZIFT. Since none of these is especially successful if any of them is necessary, physicians speak of multiple ``ART cycles.''

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ARTA
Achaemenid Research on Texts and Archaeology. Electronic newsletter of the Achemenet project. So far (ARTA 2002.001 to 2002.007), it's archaeological reports in English, French, and German. ARTA 2001.007 was about lance-guards and lance-bearers, English.

ARTCC
Air Route Traffic Control Center. Specific centers are referred to in radio communications as ``<Your City Name Here> Center.'' There are twenty of them in the US. Their principal function is to provide air traffic control service to aircraft operating on IFR flight plans within controlled airspace and during the en route phase of flight. When equipment capabilities and controller workload permit, certain advisory/assistance services may be provided to VFR aircraft.

ARTel
Automated Request transmission by TELephone.

ARTEMIS, Artemis
Advanced Relay TEchnology MISsion. Artemis is an ESA spacecraft that carries payloads supporting land mobile communications, navigation systems and data relay systems. It operates at S-band (2 GHz), Ka-band (26 GHz) and optical frequencies. It was originally launched on an Ariane-5 on July 12, 2001, intended for a geostationary orbit. The failure of an upper stage of the booster left it in a low orbit, and it took 18 months of tweaking to get it to its destination, using an ion-propulsion system originally intended to counteract drift from the final orbit.

ARTEMIS
Advanced Research TEstbed for Medical InformaticS.

ARTEMIS
All-Terrain Radar for Tactical Exploitation of MTI and Imaging Surveillance.

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Artemis
The twin sister of Apollo. Keep reading.

[column]

ARTF
Anti-Rape Task Force. An organization at UB which provides night-time escorts to and from campus buildings. It's sad that this is needed, but it would be sadder still if it weren't available.

Between any two consecutive glossary entries, it's usually possible to find some kind of connection. Artemis was the virgin hunter godess. I suppose every pantheon must have a school librarian. Actaeon, a mortal, was a hunter too. Walking his dogs one day after a hunt, he happened into a cave where she was about to take a bath in the spring. She punished him for the mistake of seeing her naked by turning him into a stag. So at least she didn't change his sex. But his dogs chased him down and killed him. As usual, there are differing versions of the precise sequence of events. The nymphs aren't talking.

ARTFL
Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language. A cooperative project of the Institut National de la Langue Française (INaLF) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Divisions of the Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Chicago. Bibliographies, searchable etexts (``databases''), text analysis capabilities, etc.

Apparently it was originally ``American Research on the Treasury of the French Language'' (TLF).

Arthritis Foundation
I just figured I'd type in a link while I still am able to.

artichokehold
Often, you really don't need to know, to know that you don't need to know. The Dicken's truth.

articulation
This word has a special meaning in education bureaucracy: it is a name for the way in which credit for courses or examinations taken at one institution is allocated or recognized by another educational institution.

ARTIS
Airborne Real-Time Imaging System. Payload for pathfinder flights in NASA's ERAST program.

Art Loss Register, The
The Art Loss Register ``is a permanent computerised database of stolen and missing works of art, antiques and valuables, operating on an international basis to assist law enforcement agencies in the battle against art theft.''

See also Museum Security Network.

ARTS
Arts Recognition and Talent Search. The core program of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. The ``program provides recognition and awards to young 17- and 18- year old artists [as opposed to old 17- and 18-year-old artists] in the performing, literary and visual arts.''

ARTS
Automated Radar (air) Terminal System.

Arubus
The public transit bus service on the Caribbean island of Aruba, providing regular daily service from 6am to midnight, and twenty-four-hour chuckles for Latinists. Round-trip fare between the beach hotels and Oranjestad is about two US dollars.

I suppose, like, the central terminal is in some seedy area, with a wino in, uh, rags reclining against the front of, ummm, some filthy building -- Arubum.

(This is an ENTRY UNDER TEST. We may scrap some of it later.)

ARV
Alternative Rouge et Verte. French `Red and Green Alternative' political party.

The ruling coalition in Germany from 1998 to 2005 was a red-green (rot-grün) coalition that succeeded Helmut Kohl's (CDU/CSU)/FDP coalition. (Black-yellow; schwarz-gelb in German.)

The most common form of color blindness is red-green color blindness. (It's an X-linked trait, so it's much more common among men than women.) Most people who are red-green color blind have some ability to tell reds from greens, but lighting must be good and the colored regions must be large.

It used to be common to call inherited red-green color blindness daltonism, after its discoverer, the British chemist John Dalton (1766-1844). You'd have thought that someone'd've noticed before.

ARV
Anti-RetroViral (drugs).

ARVO
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology.

ARW
Advanced Research Workshop. A part of the NATO science program.

ARXPS
Angle-Resolved X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy.

A&S
Adhesives and Sealants.

In late 2008, I needed to bone up on this subject, so a small bulge of A&S-related entries passed into the glossary snake. My main sources were Edward M. Petrie's Handbook of Adhesives and Sealants (McGraw-Hill, 2/e 2007) and the first couple of volumes of the series Adhesives and Sealants edited by Philippe Cognard (Elsevier, 2005).

Here is a list of the A&S-related entries in this glossary. The ones followed by an asterisk have no very practical content. With great sadness and self-discipline, I have omitted entries that merely use a term like adhere in a figurative (usually dead-metaphoric) sense, as in, say, ``adherent of the faith of Tours,'' or as discussed in the AAPM entry.

AS
Advanced Schottky (logic family). Also ``AS-TTL.'' A TTL subfamily with Schottky diodes in parallel with the BC junctions of those of its npn transistors that might otherwise go into saturation, thus avoiding the associated storage time delays. Essentially the same principle as the earlier Schottky logic (vide 74S), but with narrower linewidths and consequent better performance. Cf. ALS.

AS
Aggregate Supply. Another macroeconomic fiction.

AS, .as
American Samoa. USPS abbreviation; international designation used in domain names.

AS
Ankylosing Spondylitis. See SAA.

As
Arsenic, in the nitrogen group, in the period below phophorus. Like phosphorus (P), a common n-type dopant in semiconductor silicon (Si). Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

-AS
Arts and Sciences. A productive acronymic suffix, used mostly by educational and entertainment institutions:
AAAS
AMPAS
ATAS
CAS
CLAS
FAS
IATAS
ISLAS
NATAS

Read on.

A&S
Arts and Sciences. As a scientist, I used to feel a greater affinity for people in the humanities (the A of A&S) than with those in the social or behavioral putative sciences. I always felt that someone who had read great literature or a great deal of history or at least learned a couple of extra languages was someone who knew something -- an educated person. Even philosophers, whose approach to ``giving an account of'' things is the approach that modern science was created in opposition to, are generally intelligent people who are familiar with some difficult ideas and who reason with extreme care. I never felt the same respect for students of the, you know, nonscience ``sciences.'' I still don't, much, but after all these years, I find the sharp lines between the disciplines are blurring, and I don't think it's because of my eyeglass prescription.

More about this later as I organize my thoughts. In the meantime, see the A & L entry. See the previous entry for productive use in acronyms.

The Japanese equivalent of ``Arts and Sciences'' is the word gakugei, which is normally written with just two kanji characters. That sounds compact and efficient, but it takes about 16 strokes to draw those kanji.

A direct translation of ``arts and sciences'' into French, ignoring the different senses of science in the two languages, is `arts et sciences.' Boy, that one's gonna be hard to remember, sure. The et phrase doesn't seem to be used in Francophone academia as the and version is in Anglophone, but judging from the play of Ionesco discussed at the 40 entry, I think there must be some resonance.

as
ASsembler. A program that converts assembly-language mnemonics to machine language (executable code). See the a.out entry, what the heck.

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as, a.s.
Auris Sinistra. Lat., `left ear.' Do not make the common error of overanalyzing this definition. It doesn't mean `evil listening device' (that would be Auriculum Sinister) and it doesn't mean `the ear left over when you cut one off' (that would be Van Gogh) Latin is odd, but not that odd.

For even more full inanity, check out the other side: a.d.

ASA
Acoustical Society of America.

ASA
Acetyl Salicylic Acid. In other proper chemical terms: Acetyl Salicylate. In conventional terms: aspirin.

ASA
Acrylic Styrene Acrylonitrile (terpolymer). A/k/a acrylonitrile-styrene-acrylate terpolymer. Like GE's Geloy ®.

ASA
Advertising Standards Authority (of South Africa). It apparently has the legal authority to declare an advertisement offensive and prevent it from being broadcast in the country.

ASA
African Studies Association, founded 1957. A constituent society of the ACLS since 1990. ACLS has an overview, but that page, like all of its constitutent-society pages, has changed in the past and now has a demeaning and transient-looking URL (seriously, ``societies.aspx?sid=363E4D14-98A2-DB11-A735-000C2903E717''?), so I'm not even going to link to there.

ASA
American Society for Aesthetics. I really like the cadence of that name. Founded 1942, a constituent society of the ACLS since 1950. ACLS has an overview.

The ASA sponsors an annual conference (every year!) and three divisional conferences annually (that too). The ASA publishes the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (JAAC; ever since the founding in 1942) and the ASA Newsletter (ISSN 1089-1668). Both publications are free to members.

ASA
American Society of Anesthesiologists.

ASA
American Society on Aging.

ASA
American Sociological Association. Founded 1905, a constituent society of the ACLS since 1919. ACLS has an overview.

ASA
American Standards Association. Became ANSI. You'd become antsy too if everyone went by the same short-form name as you did.

This is the ``film speed'' ASA, which has been adopted about whole by ISO. So ``ASA 80'' is now ``ISO 80.'' (Not only that, but ISO 400 is the same as ASA 400 used to be. Cool, huh?) Those Germans with their DIN -- Tsk, tsk, tsk: they have to learn to get with the program, not go off all unilateral all the time.

ASA
American Statistical Association. Founded November 27, 1839 as the American Statistical Society (five years after the founding of the Royal Statistical Society). Less than three months later they changed the name to the current one. Hmm... the ASA's online history gives a lot of other details about the founding, but glosses over this point. I guess they figured no one would be interested.

ASA
American Stroke Association. ``A Division of American Heart Association,'' no definite article, and capitalization thus, is the appositive description they use, even though they generally refer to ``the American Heart Association'' (my italics). Actually, they do it both ways, but without the article in the most prominent places. Seems to me they should take an aspirin immediately. Strike that: I should.

ASA
American Studies Association. Founded in 1950 (and chartered in 1951?), a constituent society of the ACLS since 1958.

ASA
American Supply Association. ``The American Supply Association is a federation of regional and national organizations serving the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling-Piping (PHCP) Industry. For over 25 years, ASA has provided the forum for PHCP wholesale distributors from around the country to discuss the critical issues facing them. Membership in ASA provides a national alliance with industry colleagues, manufacturers and other suppliers that is virtually impossible to get elsewhere.''

ASA
Angle-Side-Angle. The same triangle congruence theorem as Angle-Angle-Side (vide AAS).

ASA
Antarctic Support Associates. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is apparently their sole customer.

ASA
Arizona School Administrators.

ASA
Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK & the Commonwealth. ``[F]ounded in 1946 to promote the study and teaching of social anthropology, to present the interests of social anthropology and to maintain its professional status. Its aim is to assist in any way possible in planning research, to collate and publish information on social anthropology and to function as a register of social anthropologists.''

ASA
Association of Subscription Agents.

ASA
Australian Society of Anaesthetists.

ASA
Australian Society of Authors. Cf. SoA, I guess.

ASA
Australian Sonographers Association.

ASA
Autism Society of America.

ASA
Automotive Service Association. A nonprofit trade association serving owners and managers of automotive mechanical and collision repair businesses.

ASAA
American Sleep Apnea Association. ``The ASAA is a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing injury, disability, and death from sleep apnea and to enhancing the well-being of those affected by this common disorder.'' ASAA organizes a network of ``A.W.A.K.E. groups'' (A.W.A.K.E. stands for ``Alert, Well, And Keeping Energetic''). The ASAA website used to be called the A.W.A.K.E. Network.

ASAB
The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. (When I checked in February 2005, the URL was impersonating a sloth.)

ASADHO
L'Association africaine de défense des droits de l'homme République démocratique du Congo. 'African Association for the Defense of Human Rights (in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.' (A/K/A Congo/Kinshasa, Zaïre, former Belgian Congo.) A grantee of NED, which maintains a webpage for its recent announcements and communiqués.

Changed its name in 1997 from AZADHO, which was founded in 1991.

ASAE
American Society of Agricultural Engineers. Offices at 2950 Niles Road, St. Joseph, MI.

ASAE
American Society of Association Executives. It must be some kind of distinction to have the words Society and Association in your organization name.

ASAIL
Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. According to the ASAIL by-laws, Jan. 4, 1991 (maybe that should be 1971, the year ASAIL was founded): ``The purpose of the organization shall be to promote study, criticism, and research on the oral traditions and written literatures of Native Americans; to promote the teaching of such traditions and literatures; and to support and encourage contemporary Native American writers and the continuity of Native oral traditions.''

ASAM
American Society of Addiction Medicine.

ASAMA
The American Sport Art Museum and Archives. ``[A] division of the United States Sports Academy [USSA].'' Hey look, as long as you're in Daphne, Alabama, why don't you hop on over to nearby South Bend, Indiana, and check out the National College Football Hall of Fame?

ASAP
Aging Services Access Point.

ASAP
American Syringomyelia Alliance Project. They explain that ``Syringomyelia, often referred to as SM, is a chronic disorder involving the spinal cord. For reasons that are only now being understood, cerebrospinal fluid enters the spinal cord, forming a cavity known as a syrinx. (Doctors sometimes use other words such as cyst, hydromyelia or syringohydromyelia.) This syrinx often expands and elongates over time, destroying the center of the spinal cord. As the nerve fibers inside the spinal cord are damaged, a wide variety of symptoms can occur, depending upon the size and location of the syrinx.''

ASAP
As Soon As Possible. [More often used in imperative than in declarative sentences. Usually represents a much earlier time for the person making a request than for the person receiving it, who might interpret it as...]

Also: As Slow[ly] As Possible. Vide Brooks's Law.

ASAP
Australian Science Archives Project. Founded by University of Melbourne professor R. W. Home in 1985; continued as Austehc in 1999.

ASAPS
American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. They got the <surgery.org> domain all to themselves. Here's a text grab from the homepage (in January 2008; I suppose the catalogue will be augmented): ASAPS ``is the leading organization of board-certified plastic surgeons specializing in cosmetic plastic surgery. ASAPS Active-Member plastic surgeons are certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery or the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. Find information on Breast Augmentation, Breast Lift, Breast Reduction, Male Breast Reduction (Gynecomastia), Post-Bariatric, Liposuction (Lipoplasty), Tummy Tuck (Abdominoplasty), Chin and Cheek Augmentation, Ear Surgery (Otoplasty), Eyelid Surgery (Blepharoplasty), Facelift (Rhytidectomy), Facial Implants, Forehead Lift, Hair Transplantation, Lip Augmentation, Nose Reshaping (Rhinoplasty), Chemical Peel Light, Chemical Peel Deep, Injectable Treatments such as BOTOX® Cosmetic or Myobloc®, Laser Hair Removal, Microdermabrasion, Micropigmentation, Spider Vein Treatment, and Skin Resurfacing.''

Cf. ASCDAS.

ASARC
Army Systems Acquisition Review Council.

as as
A collocation that can occur naturally in a grammatical text. For example, ``he is not known so much as a flea as as a louse.'' That it's possible, however, doesn't imply that it's advisable. This infelicity can be repaired in many ways, such as ``...but as a louse'' or ``is known less as a flea than as a louse.''

ASAS
Advanced Solid Axial Stage.

ASAS
All Sources Analysis System. Military intelligence acronym.

ASAS-WL
All Sources Analysis System-WarLord.

ASAT
The American Studies Association of Turkey. Here is the mission statement from the association's statutes (sec. I, art. 2) from its 1988 founding. As far as I have been able to determine, the phrase ``the American researchers in Turkey'' means `Turkish researchers in the field of American Studies' (``Turkish Americanists'' would be easily understood within the discipline).
The aims and the subjects of activities of the Association:
To encourage the American researchers in Turkey, to deliver conferences, to organize symposiums and seminars, to prepare researches and publications, to provide materials, such as microfilm, magazine, book, periodical etc., to provide sponsorships for the researchers to be realized in USA by the Turkish scientists and researchers, to encourage the cooperative studies about the social and cultural relations between Turkey and USA, and thus to help the promotion of Turkey as well as Turkish scientists, writers and researchers at abroad. The association does not deal with religion and politics. The association may acquire immovable [real property] either for its own residence or to realize its aims.

Interesting in the last two sentences what it can and can't do. ASAT's principal publication is Journal of American Studies of Turkey. It's awfully generous of them to publish American studies of Turkey, but learning what American scholars think of Turkey seems like a rather indirect way of advancing the field of American Studies. Then again, I suppose -- uh, wait a sec, someone on the other line... Oh! It seems that JAST is a Turkish journal for studies of America or things American. You know, this is all very confusing. And these aren't really American studies anyway: the studies are mostly done by Turks. They should call it the ``Journal of Turkish Studies'' (JOTS).

ASAT
Anti-SATellite (weapon).

ASAT
ASpartate AminoTransferase. See AST.

ASB
Alternatives to Slash and Burn (agricultural methods).

ASB
Application-Specific Bits.

ASBA
Arizona School Boards Association.

ASBE
Arizona State Board of Education.

ASBJ
American School Board Journal. Issued by the NSBA.

ASBM
Add Soap to Bubble Memory. A righteous opcode. See it and others by (or at the very least reposted by) Mischa here.

ASBMB
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

ASBO, Asbo
Anti-Social Behaviour Order. A new tradition in the UK. It's not a command to behave antisocially, but an injunction against such behavior. It's issued to a private (or occasionally an insufficiently private) individual by a magistrate's court, upon petition by a community group. It sounds like something the Lord Protector might have approved. As of mid-2005, they were being issued at a rate of 65 per week (nationwide, I understand), twice the rate in 2004.

One morning during the general disorder of August 2011, Radio 4's ``Today'' program aired a brief interview with a group of the previous night's looters in Manchester. One of them, who had no arrest record yet, said ``the prisons are over-crowded. What are they going to do? Give me an ASBO? I'll live with that.''

The current (2012) government wants to replace Asbos and other orders with new, presumably more effective orders. Proposals were announced in May 2012.

ASBO
Association of School Business Officials. I'm going to make it my official business, one day, to school myself in what exactly this association is about -- but please, Lord, not yet.

ASBP
American Society of Bariatric Physicians. For the surgeons, there's ASBS.

ASBPE
American Society of Business Press Editors. ``Founded in 1964,'' it ``is the professional association for full-time and freelance editors and writers employed in the business, trade, and specialty press.''

ASBS
American Society for Bariatric Surgery. Bariatry is medical practice intended to lighten your body. Barratry is legal malpractice typically intended to lighten your wallet. Is this procedure covered by your insurance? Hmmm: a two-fer. (Okay, okay, so it's really ``bariatrics'' and not ``bariatry.'') A broader bariatrics society is the ASBP.

ASBS
American Society of Breast Surgeons. The organization's logo is a suggestively stylized ess.

ASBS
American Society for Butt Surgery. This doesn't exist yet, afaik, but it just seemed to fit into the ASBS ambiance.

Over at Nick's Patio, for many years one of the menu items was a butt steak. The term made some of the waitresses uncomfortable. On the other hand, they weren't up in arms, so to speak, about chicken breast. Does this green apron make me look--let's not go there. Anyway, the name on the menu was eventually changed to ``top sirloin.'' Orders for ``top sirloin'' and ``chopped sirloin'' are now regularly confused.

ASC
Accredited Standards Committee. ANSI acronym.

ASC
Alabama Supercomputer Center.

Snicker. Snort.

ASC
Altered State[s] of Consciousness. Unconsciousness usually doesn't count. May or may not be chemically assisted.

ASC
American Society of Cytopathology. Cells? Cells that get sick? That's so old-fashioned! I would've thought we'd all be using silicon by now. Man, get with the program!

ASC
Association of Systematics Collections. ``The mission of the Association of Systematics Collections (ASC) is to support and enhance natural history collections, their human resources, and the institutions that house them, for the benefit of science and society.''

ASC
Austin Software Council.

ASC
Australian Society of Cytology. Hmmm. Whatever it is, it's spreading.

ASC
Australian Sports Commission.

ASCAP
American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. I don't know where I read that they had about 80,000 members in 1999. Am I wrong to be surprised if ASCAP tripled its membership in eight years? In February 2007, the About ASCAP page states that ``ASCAP is a membership association of more than 275,000 U.S. composers, songwriters, lyricists, and music publishers of every kind of music.'' It doesn't say how many of these members are living, or how many are legatees or whatever of deceased composers and authors. (Not that I object to royalties being paid to the estates of the late great or even the late not great, but it would be interesting to know.)

All copyrighted songs played in public require the payment of fees for usership. Smaller bars in the US typically pay annual fees of between $150 and $500.

ASCD
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

ASCDAS
American Society of Cosmetic Dermatology and Aesthetic Surgery. You should compare this to ASAPS, because I really can't.

ASCE
American Society of Civil Engineers.

ASCH
American Society of Church History.

ASCH
American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. I have a suggestion: visit the Aden entry.

Asche
German noun (female) meaning `ash.'

ASCI
American Society for Clinical Investigation. ``The ASCI is an honor society of physician-scientists, those who translate findings in the laboratory to the advancement of clinical practice. Founded in 1908, the Society is home to more than 2,700 members who are in the upper ranks of academic medicine and corporate healthcare.'' It sounded so smooth until I hit that ``corporate healthcare'' bump.

I already checked: there doesn't seem to be any EBCDI. What I did find was a lot of German-language pages conscientiously avoiding acronym-assisted AA-pleonasm by using constructions like ``EBCDI Codierung'' (for `EBCDIC encoding'). It sounded so smooth until I bumped into ``EBCDI- und ASCII-Code.''

ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Developed by ANSI. Dominant binary representation scheme for character data in non-IBM machines. Original-flavor ASCII, and still the character encoding that is officially ASCII, uses only seven bits (represents 128 characters), but since data is now typically transferred and stored in bytes (8 bits), the eighth bit has been used as a parity check. In increasingly common use are eight-bit ``extended ASCII'' codes, which accommodate accented characters (see this faq). [But good luck trying to find an extended ASCII with haczek (inverted circumflex) characters; see ISO 8859.] Cf. EBCDIC. Vide collating sequence.

ASCII is also a medium for ``Art,'' or primitive images. Stroll down electronic memory lane at ``Fixed-Width Days.''

ASCII is equivalently ECMA-6, ISO 646, and DIN 66003.

A surf around the web shows that the all-caps form ASCII is dominant, but that the verb form asciify in all its inflections (..., asciified, asciifying) and the derived noun asciification occurs in lower case (with a in upper case as appropriate) about as often as in upper case with lower-case suffix (e.g., ASCIIfy).

ASCISM
Association des Cadres et Infirmiers(ières) en Santé Mental. There's always space in the glossary for another ism.

ASCL
American Society of Comparative Law, founded 1951. Sponsors American Journal of Comparative Law.

A constituent society of the ACLS since 1995. ACLS has an overview.

Much of the ``Comparative'' is with law in other nations, but that doesn't make it ``International Law.'' If you're interested in that, see ASIL (American Society of International Law). See also ASLH (American Society of Legal History).

ASCLA
Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies. A division of the ALA.

ASCN
American Society for Clinical Nutrition. The Clinical Division of the American Society for Nutritional Sciences.

I feel like I must have mentioned it already, but this is probably a good place to repeat it: being a nutritionist in a hospital is frustrating. You're trying to do the careful job you were trained for, but you depend for the fulfillment of your instructions not on nurses but on the illiterate minimum-wage substance abusers that the hospital hires to staff the kitchen. If you are not indomitably cheerful, consider other work.

ASCO
Advanced Systems Concepts Office (``Soldiers are our business.'')

ASCO
American Society of Clinical Oncology. Publishes the JCO) (Journal of Clinical Oncology).

ASCO
Association of Schools and Colleges of Optometry.

ASCO
Automatic Switch COmpany. (Electric power and fluid flow switches.)

asco
Spanish: `disgust.'

ASCOMN
Not etymologically related to preceding entry (asco), though it might as well be:
And Spewing Coffee Out My Nose. Usually follows one of the brilliant ROTFLM?O witticisms [Rolling On the Floor Laughing My ? Out/Off].

ascorbic acid
You know this is vitamin C, and you know that vitamin C prevents scurvy. What you probably didn't realize is that ascorbic is a congener of scurvy. The lexeme has been traced back to a middle Low German word schorbûk, apparently the source of the French scorbut. The French word was adopted as scurvy in English (the missing t better reflects French pronunciation) and a modern Latin scorbutus was back-constructed from the French. ``Ascorbic'' is just a simplified and anglicized form of modern Latin ascorbuticus (`i.e., `anti-scurvy').

Ascorp
Angola Selling CORPoration. A monopoly exporting partnership including Sodiam, the state marketing company, and Israeli businessman Lev Leviev, which was given marketing rights over Angola's diamonds. It was set up in 2000 and led to a legal dispute with deBeers in 2001.

ASCOT
Advanced Solar Cell Orbital Test.

See D.C. Marvin, M. Gates, Space Photovoltaic Research and Technology, 1991. NASA Conference Publication 3121, pp. 44-1 to 44-3 for early published announcement.

ASCOT
Apparatus with SuperCOnducting Toroids. A device planned for the LHC. In 1992 the group that was planning it joined forces with the group planning EAGLE. The child of that merger is ATLAS.

Ascot
A town in Berkshire, in southern England. Horse races are held at Ascot Heath, on a two-mile track near Ascot that was laid out by order of Queen Anne. The major race there, for the Ascot Gold Cup, is a royal event.

ascot
Decorative neckwear. A broad cravat with square ends, looped under the chin and often held in place with an ornamental stud. Named after Ascot.

Instead of the stud these days there may be velcro. And maybe the square end is no longer fashionable. I don't know how broad it's supposed to be, but I lived through the seventies, when clowns had to struggle to stand out in the bell-bottomed, big-haired, loud-tied crowd. The name Ascot still has some cachet (without yet being degraded into a common adjective like ritzy), so it's also been applied to articles of clothing all the way down to footwear. The whole concept is breaking down. It's part of a general process that we have described as ``the universe going to hell in an Ascot handbasket'' (tm).

Here's a page of mostly-neoprene equine neckware. I mention it here because the page used to include an ``Ascot'' line (or maybe a ``Pelham Ascot'' line) -- so appropriate. The makers claimed that their products sweat a ``horse's neck and throat latch area, giving it a more elegant appearance.'' Take a gander at the page -- the neck sweats look like a Gary Larson inspiration. They should sweat the rump as well and get a cross-training effect. I spoke too soon; they offer tail wraps on this page. On this page you can find ``Dressage Sport Horse Boots `COLORS' by Pelham Ascot.'' I'd like to parse that with ``sport horse'' as an attributive noun.

ASCRS
American Society of Cataract & Refractive Surgery.

ASCRS
The American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons. Founded in 1899. Its official journal is DCR.

[column]

ASCS
Yeah, so what does he want to know? Oh: Australasian Society for Classical Studies.

[column]

ASCSA
American School of Classical Studies at Athens. (Web site from Athens.)

Founded in 1881. It offers two major research libraries: the Blegen, with 80,000 volumes dedicated to ancient Greece; and the Gennadius, with 106,000 volumes and archives devoted to post-classical Greece. ASCSA also sponsors excavations and provides centers for advanced research in archaeological and related topics at its excavations in the Athenian Agora and Corinth, and houses an archaeological laboratory at the main building complex in Athens.

By agreement with the Greek government, ASCSA is authorized to serve as liaison with the Greek Ministry of Culture on behalf of American students and scholars for the acquisition of permits to excavate and to study museum collections. (This is not a minor matter. As I recall, foreign nationals all have to go through some such embassy-like liaison.)

The ASCSA secretary keeps an up-to-date roster of museum and site closings. This is extremely useful if you plan to visit before summer 2004; in the run-up to the 2004 Olympics, when a lot of places are closing temporarily to repair and renovate for the expected onslaught of tourists. (A similar thing happened with Rome in the late 1990's.)

ASC X12
The US national standard for cross-industry electronic data interchange (EDI). Version 4 of X12, out in 1997 (five years after version 3) is scheduled to be the last version distinct from UN/EDIFACT. After that, subject to various approvals, the ASC X12 bureaucratic apparatus becomes a part of the international UN/EDIFACT administration, and a technical migration to the international standard will be encouraged. New UN/EDIFACT versions will be submitted by ASC X12 to ANSI for adoption as an ANS.

The X12 standard itself is available online from Harbinger. (The version served there is still 3040, meaning version 3, fourth release. The current version is 4010.)

ASC X12C
ASC X12 Committee.

ASD
Academy for Sports Dentistry. It hurts just thinking about it.

ASD
Anti-Shine-Dalgarno. Explanation at SD entry.

ASD
Adjustable-Speed Drive[s].

ASD
Aeronautical Systems Division. A division of the USAF Systems Command.

ASD
ArSenical Dermatosis. (The chemical symbol for arsenic is As.)

ASD
Atrial Septal Defect. A defect in the septum, or membrane, that separates [etymological correlation alert!] the left and right atria of the heart.

ASDA
American Student Dental Association.

AsDB
ASian Development Bank.

ASDC
Association of State Democratic Chairs. A subset of the DNC membership.

ASDC
Australian Sports Drugs Commission. (Provisional entry, understand?)

ASDC
American Society for Deaf Children.

As-deposited
That's probably as deposited, and no arsenic.

ASDF
Air Self-Defense Force. The Japanese Air Force. Cf. MSDF.

ASDSP
Application-Specific Digital Signal Processor.

ASE
American Standard English.

ASE
Amplified Spontaneous Emission.

ASE
Application Service Element.

ASE
Association for Surgical Education.

ASE
Athens Stock Exchange.

ASE
(National Institute for) Automotive Service Excellence. ``[F]ounded in 1972 as an independent, non-profit organization with a single mission: To improve the quality of automotive service and repair through the voluntary testing and certification of automotive technicians.''

``ASE also communicates its message to consumers, the media and various other publics to promote informed decision making when seeking automotive repairs. If you're a motorist, some of the information available here will prove useful when you're faced with such a choice.''

The ASE program has grown from a series of four auto tests to a comprehensive offering of more than thirty exams in the following repair categories: Automobile/Light Truck, Alternate Fuels, Medium/Heavy Truck, Truck Equipment, School Bus, Collision Repair, Engine Machinist, and Parts Specialist (Auto & Truck).

ASEA
Allmaenna Svenska Electriska Aktiebolaget.

ASEA
Advanced System Engineering Automation. Visit here and see if you can make anything of it.

ASEA
American Solar Energy Association. ``[A] national organization dedicated to advancing the use of solar energy for the benefit of U.S. citizens and the global environment.''

``ASEA publishes SOLAR TODAY, an award-winning bi-monthly magazine that covers renewable energy technologies, from photovoltaics to climate-responsive buildings to wind power.''

asea
At sea.

ASEAN
Association of SouthEast Asian Nations. Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand?

ASECS
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. ``[A]n interdisciplinary group dedicated to the advancement of scholarship in all aspects of the period . . . from the later seventeenth through the early nineteenth century.''

Founded 1969, a constituent society of the ACLS since 1976. ACLS has an overview.

It's probably worth joining just to be able to say truthfully that you're ``ASECSual.'' We have a list of at least six SECS's, mostly because it's so cool to say. We have a gender entry too.

ASEE
American Society for Engineering Education. Their main page is a ``Clearinghouse for Engineering Education.''

ASEH
American Society for Environmental History. Here's the homepage for the H-Net-sponsored mailing list.

asequible
Spanish: `reasonable.'

ASER
American Society of Emergency Radiology.

ASER
Annual Site Environmental Report.

ASES
All Saints' Episcopal School. In Fort Worth, Texas. The link doesn't work as of now (March 2003), but they own the domain, so I imagine they'll use it for more than email eventually.

You know, a common traditional way to form the plural of a single-letter abbreviation is to duplicate the letter. Oh well, just a thought.

ASES
American Solar Energy Society. You ask me, this is a risky acronym to select. Call me a coward, but I'd change the organization name first.

ASF
Active Streaming Format.

ASF
Active-X Server Framework.

ASF
Advanced Streaming Format. (Microsoft definition.)

...as far as I know
...which I believe for no particularly good reason.

ASFC
Agence des services frontaliers du Canada. `Canadian Border Services Agency.'

ASFSA
American School Food Service Association. ``The Voice of Child Nutrition.'' You know: school lunch, sloppy joe on a hamburger bun with ketchup and overcooked string beans.

ASGE
American Society For Gastrointestinal Endoscopy.

Related links: ADHF, NOSCAR, and SAGES.

[column]

ASGLE
American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy. See also a British homologue (BES). Both ASGLE and BAS are chapters of the Association Internationale d'Épigraphie Grecque et Latine (AIEGL).

ASGLE has a page of introduction to EPIGRAPH-L, which latter is managed, or whatever you would call it, by David Meadows.

Their most anticipated resource has been, of all things, a list of abbreviations.

ASGP
The Association for the Study of German Politics.

ASH
Action on Smoking and Health. A better place to start is the Master Anti-Smoking pages.

Here's a précis of the news: smoking is real bad for you, just terrible. So don't.

ASH
Average Shifted Histograms.

ASHA
American School Health Association.

ASHA
American Social Health Association. ``Social health''! What a wonderfully, cutely blushing euphemism! You're probably too young to remember this, expecially if you're young enough to remember sex, but there was a time, shortly after men emerged from caves and killed off the dinosaurs, when ``social disease'' meant sexually transmitted disease. ASHA was founded in 1914.

You know, one of the things that just kills me is people who get behind a microphone before they've learned the difference between the pronunciations of the verbs contract, contract, and contract. ASHA gets around the problem by speaking of people who ``contact an STD.'' (This sounds like something you could do over the Internet.)

ASHA
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Yeah, I have theories about the el myself.

ASHE
American Society for Healthcare Engineering.

ASHE
Association for the Study of Higher Education.

Ashley
A name given to girls born in 1965, and a few more since then, and to this guy (CV here, in RTF).

ASHNR
American Society of Head and Neck Radiology.

ASHP
American Society of Health System Pharmacists.

ASHRAE
American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-conditioning Engineers, Inc.

ASI
Addiction Severity Index. An evaluation instrument in the form of an interview, used and distributed by DENS.

ASI
Advanced Study Institute. A NATO program of long standing, of summer schools held in picturesque southern European locales. I'm not current on the rules, but not too long ago, an amusing fact was that who could go was based on where one was doing research and not on where one got one's passport. Thus, for example, Vietnamese researchers working in France could attend.

ASI
American Students for Israel. It's ``the University of California at Santa Barbara's student pro-Israel group. It was founded in September 2001 with the goal of ensuring that Israel's case receives fair representation on campus.'' Ha! They wouldn't dare try that at San Francisco State! ``ASI is a bipartisan group that organizes events, lectures and festivals and serves as a resource to students.''

ASI
Artificial Sensing Instrument[s].

ASI
Astronomical Society of India.

ASI
ATV Safety Institure. It's ``a not-for-profit division of the Specialty Vehicle Institute of America (SVIA), [which] was formed in 1988 to implement an expanded national program of all-terrain vehicle (ATV) safety education and awareness. The ASI is sponsored by Arctic Cat, Bombardier, Bush Hog, Honda, John Deere, Kawasaki, Patriot, Polaris, Suzuki, Tomberlin, and Yamaha.''

ASIA
Atomizer, Source, Inductively-coupled plasma in Atomic fluorescence spectroscopy (AFS).

ASIANMTU
And I Swear I Am Not Making This Up. Usenet abbreviation.

ASIC
Application-Specific IC.

If you're including an FPGA in some mass-produced item, AMI would like to help you migrate to ASIC's by designing and producing drop-in replacements. Naturally, a properly-designed ASIC will result in a smaller package and lower power consumption.

Man, they ought to pay me for this advertising.

[column]

ASICS
Anima Sana In Corpore Sano. A Latin phrase meaning `A sound soul in a sound body.' The acronym was chosen by a Japanese sportswear company as its name. They translate the phrase as `A sound mind in a sound body.' The proper Latin expression for that would be Animus sanus in corpore sano. But maybe they didn't want so many esses. The standard expression is Mens sana in corpore sano (see, for an example, the TC entry), but Msics probably didn't seem a good company name. The word mens contains the same root one finds in common English words like mental and medical terms like meninges.

The founders of Mensa wanted to call their organization of self-consciously smart people Mens, but that name was taken, so they chose Mensa instead, which means `table.' This is so smart it hurts my head to try to understand why it makes any sense at all. [The (feminine) Latin noun mens is third declension: genitive singular form mentis. Hence, mensa is not its form in any combination of number and case.]

ASIH
American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.

ASIL
American Society of International Law, founded 1906. Has a number of publications, including American Journal of International Law.

A constituent society of the ACLS since 1971. ACLS has an overview.

See also ASCL (American Society of Comparative Law) and ASLH (American Society of Legal History).

As I made clear
Managerese for `as I asserted without reason or explanation.'

ASIN
Amazon Standard Identification Number.

ASIP
American Society for Investigative Pathology. ASIP publishes The American Journal of Pathology. ASIP and the Association for Molecular Pathology publish The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics.

ASIS
American Society for Industrial Security.

ASIS
American Society for Information Science.

As Is
Caveat Emptor.

as it relates to
A preposition of unknown meaning.

ASITN
American Society of Interventional and Therapeutic Neuroradiology.

ASK
Amplitude-Shift Keying.

ASL
ACPI Source Language. The programming language equivalent for AML. ASL is compiled into AML images.

A/S/L, ASL, asl
Age/Sex/Location. Name, rank, and serial number for prisoners of the dating wars (POW's). Also called ``the ASL question.'' For answers, visit Hey! ASL? For that dirty, dirty, dirty let dow-oown, see the GU entry.

ASL
American Sign Language. This is only one of many signed languages, and it is no more related to English than English is related to Chinese. Sign languages are not encodings of other languages -- one does not translate from English to ASL letter-for-letter or word-for-word. The grammar is different, so such a word-for-word translation is impossible. Letter-by-letter signing is relatively slow, something like spelling out a word in speech, and is used only to give information about the source (foreign) language. There are a number of different sign languages, including one that arose recently in Nicaragua (vide LSN) (or two, counting the pidgin ISN of the first-generation signers).

Possibly the most famous students of ASL have been the non-human primates Washoe, Koko, and Nim Chimpsky. (A less common abbreviation for American Sign Language is AMESLAN.)

Just the other day I heard of a hearing woman who is married to a deaf man and is learning ASL. It's affecting her use of spoken English: she's leaving off verb inflections -- so I hear.

ASL
Association for Symbolic Logic.

ASLA
American Society of Landscape Architects.

AS-levels, A/S-levels
The AS stands for Advanced Supplementary. The AS-level exams are now taken by students in England and Wales at the end of the lower sixth form, one year before the A-levels.

ASLH
American Society for Legal History, founded 1956. Sponsors Law and History Review and Studies in Legal History, a series of book-length monographs available to ASLH members at substantial prepublication discounts. It holds an annual meeting, publishes a semiannual newsletter, and sponsors the electronic mailing list, H-Law.

A constituent society of the ACLS since 1973. ACLS has an overview.

See also ASCL and ASIL (American Societies of Comparative and International Law).

Aslib
Association for Information Management (UK). Name is evidently a holdover from a less sexy time.

ASM
Advanced Semiconductor Materials.

ASM
American Society for Microbiology.

AsMA
Aerospace Medical Association.

asma
Spanish, `asthma.' The noun is grammatically male despite the final a. Like many of the -a exceptions, this one betrays a Greek etymology.

There's a standard filthy joke that puns on asma. It can be found on the web at any of the following

The incidence of childhood asthma is increasing rapidly in the industrialized world today, in the face of many general health indicators that would lead one to expect a decline. One rap song includes a common asthma drug in its lyrics. One proposed explanation of the puzzling increase is based on the hypothesis that a certain level of exposure to pathogens is needed during infancy to train or calibrate the immune system. If this hypothesis is correct, then excessive use of antibiotics, in an urban environment that minimizes casual exposure to pathogens, may exacerbate asthmatic symptoms in those with a genetic predisposition to the syndrome.

ASMC
Association of Sales and Marketing Companies.

ASME
American Society of Magazine Editors. ``[T]he professional organization for editors of consumer magazines and business publications, which are edited, published and sold in the U.S. [Some copyeditor should point out that they probably don't want a nonrestrictive clause there.] ... ASME was organized in 1963 as the successor to the editorial committee of Magazine Publishers of America (MPA).''

ASME
American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

ASMMA
Association of Sales and Marketing Companies.

ASMO
Advanced Storage Magneto-Optical.

ASN
Abstract Syntax Notation. (ITU-T.)

ASN
Advance Ship(ping) Notice.

ASN
American Society for Neurochemistry.

.asn.
ASsociatioN. Second-level domain name in Australia (.au).

ASNC
American Society of Nuclear Cardiology.

ASNE
American Society of Newspaper Editors. The sky is falling, and the sky has been falling on the newspaper business for much of the past century. This isn't prominently mentioned on the website. The most acute problem continues to be that smaller markets can't support an independent hometown newspaper, so various kinds of mergers, consolidations, and resource-sharing arrangements are made, and smaller newspapers go out of business. The only odd thing is that the newspaper editors, who ought to be at least vaguely aware of developments at large, don't seem to realize that their situation is not unique to newspapers.

Let's add a column inch or two to this entry. On April 13, 1999, Andrew Grove (then still the chairman of Intel), spoke before the annual meeting of the ASNE. ``You are where Intel was three years before the roof fell in on us,'' he said, referring to the time in the late 1980's when Intel lost its command and then most of its market share in memory chips, and switched to making microprocessors to survive and then prosper. He suggested that to survive, what newspapers should do is focus on their putative strength and provide better ``insight'' -- analysis and context. (This was before blogs became big.)

ASNR
American Society of NeuroRadiology. Founded in 1962. Publishes the AJNR.

ASNS
American Society for Nutritional Sciences. Founded in 1928 as the AIN.

ASNT
American Society for Neural Transplantation. Throw the microswitch, Igorrrr! Maybe some people found their name a little scary. Now they're the ASNTR.

ASNT
American Society for Nondestructive Testing.

ASNTR
American Society for Neural Transplantation and Repair. Earlier known as the ASNT.

ASN.1
Abstract Syntax Notation 1. An ISO/ITU-T standard language for the representation of data. There's a hyperlinked description at FOLDOC.

ASO
Alabama Symphony Orchestra. In Birmingham, England. No really, in Birmingham, Alabama.

ASO
Arteriosclerosis obliterans.

ASO
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. The devil went down to Georgia...

ASOC
Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition. A lobbying (``information-proving'') coalition of NGO's. You know -- Save The Penguins, that sort of thing.

asocio
Spanish, `I associate.'

ASOCIO
Asian-Oceanian Computing Industry Organization. ``[E]stablished on June 4, 1984 in Tokyo, Japan to promote, encourage and foster trade between the various members and to develop the computing industry in the Asian and Oceanian region.''

ASOR
The American Schools of Oriental Research. Founded 1900. ``ASOR's mission is to initiate, encourage and support research into, and public understanding of, the peoples and cultures of the Near East from the earliest times.'' It's pronounced like the words ``as or'' (stress on initial syllable).

A constituent society of the ACLS since 1998. ACLS has an overview.

ASOS
Automated Surface Observing System[s]. (More at this link.)

Asp
The kind of snake that Cleopatra used to commit suicide.

ASP
Abstract Service Primitive.

ASP, .asp
Active Server Page[s]. Microsoft's name for html pages with dynamic content.

...
I first tried a product called DB Web, from a company named Aspect Software that had just been acquired by Microsoft. After a bit of experimentation, I realized that DB Web ... was more of a tool for querying data from Microsoft Access databases (it wrote VB code on the back end) than a real application development platform. (As a side note, Microsoft stopped supporting DB Web shortly after I evaluated it and rereleased it as Active Server Pages (ASP) a few months later.)

The quote is from the preface of Rob Brooks-Bilson's book Programming ColdFusion (O'Reilly, August 2001). Brooks-Bilson started using what was then Allaire's Cold Fusion in early 1996, shortly after evaluating and deciding not to use ASP. Cold Fusion was created by J.J. and Jeremy Allaire, and first released in 1995. [Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons (not physicists as Brooks-Bilson claims, but electrochemists) made headlines in 1989 with exciting claims about cold fusion that failed to be confirmed by anyone else.] Early in 2001, Allaire was acquired by Macromedia. In 2003, Jeremy Allaire took the title of Macromedia Founder Emeritus. He blogged then that ``[a]fter eight years with Allaire and Macromedia, I've decided to move on. What a ride its been, and will no doubt continue to be.''

ASP
Advanced Speech Processor.

[column]

ASP
American Society of Papyrologists.

``[F]ounded in 1961 to further the study of ancient Greek and Latin papyri and of the materials contained in them. The Society supports and encourages research in the field, the teaching of the discipline, and opportunities for international cooperation by the scholars in the field. The ASP publishes The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists (BASP), the only North American journal in the field of papyrology. It also publishes a monograph series, American Studies in Papyrology, and occasional supplements to BASP. Each year, the ASP holds its Annual Meeting in conjunction with the APA/AIA Annual Meeting; the Annual Meeting features speakers as well as the election of officers and other business.''

ASP
American Society of Parapsychologists. I bet you didn't know that.

Hah! See?

This organization doesn't have an existence yet in your world of ordinary experience, but it's coming. Don't ask me how I know -- I just ... know.

Do not follow the link to CSICOP! You'll be sorry! Don't say you weren't warned!

ASP
Analog Signal Processing.

ASP
AntiSocial Personality. Visit AES; you can all form a Mohr's Stress Circle and feel all better. Jerks.

ASP
AppleTalk Session Protocol.

ASP
Application Service Provider.

According to an advertising section in the New York Times, Monday, May 22, 2000 (hey, I gotta get my ``information'' somewhere) ``revenue from ASP services that were essentially nonexistent just three years ago hit $150 million [in 1999], according to researchers at IDC...''

There are many different kinds of ASP's. The general idea is that they provide application software to customers' machines, on a subscription or a per-use basis. Among the kinds of support they provide: research (into hardware, software, and user need compatibilities), installation, upgrading, help-desk, and maintenance.

ASP
Association of Shareware Professionals. This entry and the Microsoft ASP entry above are glaring at each other over the shoulders of the AntiSocial Personality (ASP) entry.

ASP
Association of Subspecialty Professors. A part of AAIM, ASP is the national organization of subspecialty internal medicine divisions at the US medical schools and several non-university teaching hospitals.

ASP
Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

ASP
Average Selling Price.

ASPA
American Society of Pension Actuaries.

``Actuaries, Consultants, Administrators and Other Benefits Professionals.'' -- ``Dedicated to the Private Pension System.''

ASPA
Association of Specialized and Professional Accreditors. ``ASPA-member accreditors set national educational standards for entry into about 40 specialized disciplines or defined professions.''

Corresponding Canadian organisation: AAAC.

ASPCA
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Vide SPCA.

ASPD
AntiSocial Personality Disorder. ``Yer SICK, that's your problem!''

ASPECT
Antarctic Sea-ice Processes, Ecosystems and ClimaTe. A GLOCHANT program.

aspect
Appearance. The ``aspect'' of a railroad signal is its color. The two standard British signalling schemes:

3-aspect
RED Stop and wait here.
YELLOW Next signal is red; prepare to stop there.
GREEN Next signal is not red; full speed permitted.

4-aspect
RED Stop and wait here.
YELLOW Next signal is red; prepare to stop there.
DOUBLE YELLOW Next signal is yellow; prepare to stop at the one after it.
GREEN Next signal is not single-yellow or red; full speed permitted.

The advantage of the four-aspect scheme is that for any given signal spacing, higher speeds are possible (with the same margin of safety). For any given top speed, 4-aspect signals, placed twice as frequently along the line, allow closer spacing of trains than 3-aspect signals.

When I was in eleventh grade, driver education replaced one term (half a semester) of gym. The main thing I was taught was that there are no yellow traffic lights; the colors are red, amber, and green. ``Remember: there are no...''

In tenth grade we got a term of sex ed. You can imagine what that was like.

(Tenth grade corresponds chronologically to fourth form in Britain.)

Come think of it, the main thing I learned in ninth grade drafting class was that Mr. Moran had scrimped and saved, scrimped and saved!, to get all us ingrates fine plastic triangles and high-quality number-five pencils. I was by the old school a couple of years ago; the mechanical drawing room is now just another computer lab.

According to Desirable Men, p. 179,

... Karen, for instance, knew that Tom would walk down the hall by the science room after third period. So, naturally, Karen would be there waiting for him to pass by. You see, high school teaches girls how to plot and scheme to get the boy they like. ...

as|peers
American Studies PEERS. Evidently, ``as'' is meant as a pun; here's the general description from the November 1, 2007, announcement:
as|peers is a new, annual, peer reviewed journal for young American Studies scholars in Europe. It is a platform for the best work done by American Studies graduate students below the PhD-level. It aims to foster academic exchange among young Americanists across Europe, and to thereby advance the field and its genuine European perspective on 'America' and its presences and effects around the world.

as|peers is the only American Studies journal specifically targeting graduate students enrolled in MA Programs in Europe. It is located at the American Studies MA program at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Every issue will contain peer-reviewed, academic work, as well as a section of art, poetry, and other contributions. Its first issue, scheduled to be in print in March 2008, will aim to produce a snapshot of graduate American Studies in Europe.

I'd heard of dancing about architecture, but rhyming about American Studies is a new one on me.

(Yes, the name is uncapitalized and contains a vertical line. Some people hate cataloguers.)

ASPI
Advanced SCSI Programming Interface. I think maybe it's originally an Adaptec design.)

ASPIC
Application Service Provider Industry Consortium. Like most ASP sites, the ASPIC site includes the character sequence

              w h a t   i s   a n   A S P ?

ASPIC
Armed Services Personnel Interrogation Center.

aspic
A savory meat jelly containing portions of fowl, game, fish, hard boiled eggs, etc. See more.

AsPiC
Association des Pilotes de Cage. `Cage Pilots' Association' in French. Founded October 30, 1999. Gosh that's recent. ``The Cage,'' invented by Jean-Louis Darlet, is sort of intermediate between a paraglider and a hang glider.

ASPIC
Association for Strategic Planning in Internal Communications.

ASPIC
Author's Standard Prepress Interfacing Code.

aspiradora
Spanish: `vacuum cleaner.'

aspirin
Active ingredient: salicylate. (Link to 3D chemical model, mirror of <http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/multimedia/images/gif/a/aspirin.gif>.)

ASPLUNDH
I saw a small pickup truck mounted with yellow warning lights, and on the tailgate this word was written in all caps. Perhaps you saw the same truck and wondered what that long acronym stood for. I'm not saying that's what I wondered -- I'm an expert! If you want to know about Asplundh, you should visit its subentry under Nomenclature is destiny.

ASPNR
American Society of Pediatric NeuroRadiology.

ASPP
American Schools of Professional Psychology.

ASPP
Application-Specific Programmable Product.

ASPS
Advanced Sleep-Phase Syndrome. Falling asleep and awaking earlier. Common in the elderly. Due to the noisy background -- i.e., the broad range of natural variation in sleep patterns -- a genetic variation in sleep pattern was not reported until 1999 (see FASPS).

ASPSN
American Society of Plastic Surgical Nurses. No kidding!

ASQ, A.S.Q.
American Society for Quality.

If you don't care what kind of quality you get, you can have as much as you like.

ASR
Airport Surveillance Radar. Radar used to detect and display aircraft position in terminal areas. ASR provides range and azimuth information but not elevation. Coverage can extend up to 60 miles. Cf. ARSR.

ASR
Automatic Send and Receive.

ASR
Automatic Speech Recognition. Approximately the inverse of text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis.

ASRM
American Society for Reproductive Medicine, founded in 1944 as the American Fertility Society.

ASRT, asrt
American Society of Radiologic Technologists.

ASS
The Academy of Superior S(tuff).

ASS
Athletic Sport Sponsoring GmbH. Oh, so they're athletic supporters! That's close enough.

They also provide nutritional advice and Handy-phone rental. Both things useful for one kind of ass or another.

ass
A simple past-tense form of the German verb meaning `eat.' It's hard to think of anything more appropriate to say.

According to the very latest orthographic rules, this is spelled . It is the past-tense form (of essen) in first and third person singular. Cf. Arsch.

assassination, political
Beatification, instant. Or is that ``beatification, Instant''?

The word assassin comes from the Arabic hashshashin -- `hashish eaters,' originally referring to a group of Muslim terrorists or heroes, depending on your point of view, whose main activity was assassinating Crusaders. They were active in Persia and Syria from 1090 to 1272. Persia and Syria... hmmm. (No, there weren't a lot of Crusaders in Persia. This forced them to kill other people instead.)

The Roman Catholic Church, which instigated the crusades (Christian jihads or rescue missions, depending on your point of view), has increasingly stringent rules on who may be sainted. It's still pretty easy to get beatified (although you have to die first -- cf. Tiberius K., James entry). This gives some of the prerogatives (appropriate word) of sainthood, and may satisfy a cult of your enthusiasts that might wane and cause no more trouble. With continued lobbying, however, your possible sanctification will eventually be considered. Bede was beatified not long after death, but went a long time without the big promotion, so he is still widely known as ``the venerable Bede,'' although he ranks as ``Saint Bede.''

In order to become a saint, you have to have led an exemplary Christian life. (Achieving the B.S.A. rank of Eagle Scout usually isn't enough, not even with a religion merit badge.) Also, you have to be found responsible for three certifiable miracles. But don't worry about that now. If you aspire to sainthood, you should concentrate on public relations (PR), taking care that everyone should know how enormously humble you are. God will provide, as they say, the necessary miracles: After you're gone, someone will pick up your pen and be cured of arthritis or writer's block -- something along those lines, usually involving your relics, so leave behind a lot of chotchkas. Needless to say, you should have your name inscribed on your pencils (order a big supply and donate them to thrift stores) and sewn into your undershirts. (Start wearing undershirts if you don't already; they reduce chafing from the hair shirt. Don't complain about the expense -- Pope Pius X used to give away his shirts.) As you can see, sainthood is a bit like going to summer camp -- a lot more pleasant if you plan ahead. A little bit like summer camp. Monogrammed cuff-links have not been associated with church-certified miracles, AFAIK, but there's always a first time.

Obviously, name recognition is very important. Pick a name that is distinctive but not weird. Changing your name is a good opportunity to put some distance between your saintable persona and an unexemplary past. If your past is too odious to ignore, you can turn a potential problem to your advantage by writing about how your conversion or redemption turned you from your earlier downward path. Lay it on thick, and remember to be humble. (For good news about a couple of famous guys who won't be competition, see SJ, S.J.)

A number of popularly but informally acclaimed saints have been quietly cast out or desanctified, particularly early martyrs for whom there is inadequate information. [Note to self: documents in safe deposit box.] No towns have been required to remove the Santa from their name on that account, but I don't know what happens with the commemorative feast day.

Probably the most famous decommissioned saint is St. Josephat, who turned out to have been Buddha. Cosmas and Damian, patrons of physicians, were suspected of being fictitious Christian retreads of the Dioscuri (who were sons of the pagan god Zeus). That case was not proven.

A frequent showcase and stepping-stone to sainthood has been the papacy. You should get a copy of Piers Marchant's highly informative How To Be Pope: What to Do and Where to Go Once You're in the Vatican (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2005). In addition to the Roman Catholic Church, Orthodox churches and some Protestant churches also recognize saints. Shop around, and leave likenesses in all the standard iconographic formats.

For more tips, read Saint-Watching by Phyllis McGinley (New York: Viking Pr., 1961). (The same year that this was published, McGinley won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Don't tell me you didn't know.) ``Although I cannot imitate the saints, I can stare at them,'' she said. Is that polite? Sure: they're dead!

Speaking of staring, once you're in, you'll want an assignment so you don't have to spend eternity just twiddling your thumbs across a harp. See the patron saints entry about that.

I was talking recently with an expert in this stuff, and she reminded me of an important hagiogenic loophole: martyrs can be sainted without any proven miracles. This method does have its drawbacks, though. One problem is publicity, er, documentation -- but cellphone cameras are becoming more common. This isn't the route for everyone, but if you choose it, I suggest packing some bibles and heading for North Korea or Saudi Arabia. I hear that in Saudi Arabia, beheadees are usually drugged for the event. In North Korea, however, at least some executions of Christians have been somewhat more, um, creative and memorable (death by crushing, for example).

As Seen on TV, AS SEEN ON TV
Label on store merchandise indicating that when it was advertised on TV, it was described as ``NOT AVAILABLE IN STORES! CALL NOW!''

Assessment
Lots of words begin with the letters A-S-S, so this stretch of the glossary is generously endowed. Un embarras des riches. For reasons of space, therefore, we have stored our extensive discussion of ``Assessment'' at the VAG entry.

AsSG
ArSenoSilicate Glass. (Chemical symbol for arsenic is As, vide supra.)

Ass, gas, or grass.
Nobody rides for free.

associations, mental
I have a book published in 1915 by The Travelers Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut. The title is Safety Engineering Applied to Scaffolds. When I see that title, I usually think that well, yes, there is the executioner to think of. Maybe I should have made this the ``divergence, semantic'' entry. It seems to me today that the term scaffolding is used generally, and scaffold in practice refers principally to the elevated platform used for execution by hanging.

ASSP
Application-Specific Standard Product.

ASSP
Axially Scattering Spectrometer Probe. Used in determining aerosol droplet concentrations.

ASSR
American Society of Spine Radiology.

ASSR, A.S.S.R.
Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. A somewhat obsolete term.

Asst., Ass't.
ASSistanT.

The longest strike on record might be 33-year Danish barbers' assistants' strike, which ended on January 4, 1961.

What -- the end of the entry already? For such an important position? Well, then, follow the link to second second.

Ass't. Head
ASSistanT HEAD. A useful managerial concept if Cerberus is to avoid spending all its time chasing its tail, and vice versa.

AST
All Systems Test.

AST
ASpartate aminoTransferase. An enzyme released by hepatocytes (liver cells) when they die. Measurement of serum AST levels has been used to detect liver damage since the 50's. ALT is used similarly.

AST
Atlantic Standard Time. GMT - 4 hrs.

AST
Atomized Suspension Technique.

AST
At (the) Same Time.

AST
Average Sampling Time.

AStA
Allgemeine StudentenAusschuss. German `General Student Committee.'

ASTA
American Society of Travel Agencies. Pronounced like Spanish hasta, meaning `up to' or `until.'

See also Tourism entry.

Their motto: ``without a travel agent, you're on your own.'' Wow -- I didn't realize that! I still don't realize it!

ASTA
American String Teachers Association.

Asta
The pet dog of Nick and Nora Charles, protagonists of the Thin Man movie series of the 1950's. William Powell played Nick Charles, and Nora was played by the devastatingly beautiful Myrna Loy.

One day in 1995 or so, over dinner with our seminar speaker that day, I said something like, ``my relationship problem is that I want all of our conversations to be like Nick and Nora Charles.'' The chairman of the department, sitting next to me and across from his fianceé, mentioned that she had made him watch the Thin Man series. I guess it was a kind of prenuptial training.

A-stage, a-stage
An early stage of thermosetting, during which the resin components are fusible and still soluble in solvents that will not dissolve the final polymer.

ASTAP
Advanced STatistical Analysis Program. Analyzes electronic circuits and other networks.

AST Computer
Founded by Albert Wong, Safi Qureshey and Tom Yuen in 1980. Here's their homepage.

ASTD
American Society for Training & Development. Founded in 1944. Publishes the glossy monthly T+D.

ASTEP
Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets. A program of NASA's Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES). That's one small... oh never mind, I'd only flub the line.

ASTER
Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission Reflectance.

Asti
A city in the Piedmont region of Italy, and capital of the province of Asti. The region is probably best known for a sparkling wine, Asti Spumante. Spumante is literally `bubbly, frothy,' and many other other less prestigious wines are called spumante; in apparent consequence, it is reported (in Wikipedia, but I also have that impression myself) that Asti Spumante is increasingly called simply Asti to deemphasize the association with the downscale spumanti.

ASTI, Asti
Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland. The ``main second level teachers' union in the Republic of Ireland, representing teachers teaching in schools attended by 75% of second level students. They include voluntary secondary schools, community and comprehensive schools and colleges.''

ASTI disaffiliated from the ICTU (Ireland's umbrella organization for unions) in 2000. In March 2005, the ASTI convention voted overwhelmingly in favor of holding a vote of the membership in 2006 on whether to reaffiliate. However, the move was a tentative one, with the reaffiliation vote contingent on talks with the ICTU and the development and distribution of extensive informational material for members. An overwhelming tentative vote is an unusual thing, but the course of nonevents seems to have confirmed it; as of late 2008 there doesn't seem to have been any follow-up. The other two major teachers' unions, TUI and INTO, remain members of the ICTU.

ASTID
Astrobiology Science and Technology Instrument Development. A program of NASA's Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES).

As Time Goes By
Composer-lyricist Herman Hupfeld's greatest hit by far, this song was introduced in 1931 by Frances Williams (a platinum blonde, Frances Jellinek, b. 1903 in St. Paul, MN, d. 1959, NYC) in the musical Everybody's Welcome. Rudy Vallee's recording of it was mildly successful. (That year's hit was Vallee's recording of Noble, Campbell, and Connelly's ``Goodnight, Sweetheart.'') Jacques Renard and others also recorded it. It was revived in the 1942 Warner hit movie Casablanca (Bogie, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre ...), where it was sung by Dooley Wilson. Due to a general dispute about royalties, ASCAP had a kind of strike going at the time -- a ban on all new recordings -- so a new cover of the song could not be released. A rerelease of Vallee's became a hit in 1943.

Hupfeld was born and died in Montclair, NJ (1894.02.01-1951.06.08). Known as Dodo by his family, he never married and he rarely ventured very far in any direction, except possibly into the bottle. His WWI service was stateside, playing in a Navy band, and as an adult he lived in a house he had built next door to the one he grew up in. (See Harmetz, pp. 253-257.)

Bogie's line is not ``Play it again, Sam.'' Nobody says that; the again is implicit. It was ``their song'' (Bogie and Bergman's characters') before she found out that her resistance-leader husband was still alive and abandoned Rick Blaine (Bogie). Now in Casablanca, she asks Sam (Dooley Wilson) to play it [again after all that time has gone by] and then he asks Sam to play it [again after playing it for her -- if she can stand it, he can too]. Arthur `Dooley' Wilson (1886.04.03-1953.05.03) couldn't play the piano; he faked it and the camera worked around that. Faking is easier with an upright piano. Channel-surfing one ill-starred evening, I wiped out on a Monkees rerun. The scene showed the boys recording ``in studio.'' I guess it must have seemed obligatory to have a few such scenes, since it was a TV show about a rock group, duh. The camera played lovingly over the, uh, acting guitarist's guitar. If the camera could have played on the guitar instead of over the guitar, it would have done a better job. What was happening on the fretboard had nothing to do with the guitar sounds in the sound track. It would have looked slightly less fake if they'd filmed him playing air guitar. It's not as if there's a law against having movie musicians played by actual musicians (cf. The Blues Brothers).

That Casablanca could ever have come so perfectly together out of production chaos must have seemed a poor gamble. The script went through a gazillion rewrites (see WGA entry); Bergman was on loan to Warner, and the highlight of her time during the filming was learning that she had been cast as Joan of Arc in another movie. In the airport scene, she asked for directorial help -- she didn't know what emotion she was supposed to be expressing. It was obviously an Eisenstein moment.

Speaking of Ei-steins, back in the early 1980's I learned that the coda of As Time Goes By mentions Einstein's theory of relativity, and I spent many days failing to track it down. Today, of course, you just search the Internet and find it in the time it takes type a few words. Just as quickly, you can see the lyrics attributed to Dooley Wilson (the Einstein bit, if he sang it, never got into the sound track) or to John Lennon (clear demonstration of the Matthew Principle, I think).

Asti Spumante
`Foaming Asti' would be one translation. See Asti.

ASTM
American Society for Testing and Materials.

ASTP
Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

ASTR
American Society of Theatre [sic] Research. They have an electronic mailing list [subscription information for <ASTR-L@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU> here].

ASTR was founded 1956 and became a constituent society of the ACLS in 1975. ACLS has an overview.

Astrid
A girl's name. A woman's name if she grows up.

astrobleme
A meteor impact crater on the earth's surface, or the remaining traces of one. Generally, a crater is much larger than the meteorite that formed it. For example, Meteor Crater in Arizona about 1.2 km in diameter and 180 m deep. It is estimated to have been formed about 50,000 years ago by an iron meteorite about 30 m across and 110,000 tons in mass. Some of the meteorite is supposed to be visible in the side of the crater, but I couldn't make out what the guide was pointing at.

Meteor Crater is very convenient -- just a few miles south of I-40 -- but when I was there in 1991 or 1992 it was just barely wheelchair-accessible. The viewing area was reached by a stairway of stone steps that spiraled around a hill. The rise per step was shallow, and we [the strong young man in the chair and his female companion and I] got the chair to the top, but still... There's also a crater at Haviland, Kansas, but no matter how many people visit, it will never be a big attraction -- it's 10 meters across.

The largest astrobleme I'm aware of is the one centered on the Yucatan peninsula, 180 km in diameter and 65 Ma old... The impact that created it is a or the prime candidate for the cause of the mass extinctions associated with the K/T boundary.

Satellite imaging keeps discovering new ones, but I think that the largest known terrestrial ones, about 140 km, are still those at Vredefort, South Africa (1.97 Ga), and Sudbury, Canada (1.84 Ga). Boy, the ol' British Empire was really poppin' a coupla billion years ago.

The word astrobleme is a modern compound of astro- and the Greek blema. The latter is related to ballein, `to throw,' and had the meaning of `missile'; it also had the meaning of `wound' -- a metonym, I guess. The English word blemish was borrowed from the Old French blemiss- < blemir, `to render livid or pale' (that's quite a range in color), of uncertain origin. The TLF doesn't list any hypotheses related to Gk. blema.

Astro Boy
A cartoon character known in the original Japanese as Tetsuwan-Atoma (`Captain Atom'), created by Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989). Tezuka, like his father, was trained as a physician, but in the 1950's he was successful as a manga writer (Astro Boy first appeared in the manga magazine Shonen, serialized April 1951 to March 1952). He founded Mushi Production (1961-1973) and came out with an animated version (anime). (The word mushi here means `insect,' and I suppose it must have a better connotation in Japanese than the translation has in English. The universal Japanese phone greeting, which sounds like mushi-mushi, is actually moshi-moshi.) The black-and-white Astro Boy series, 1963-1965, was the first animated TV series to be produced in Japan. It became a worldwide hit (but surprisingly many of the fan sites are Australian) and opened the market for Japanese successors and imitators (like Gigantor); it established many of the conventions of the genre, such as large oval eyes. A color version was produced in the early 1980's.

A very good site, but mostly in Japanese: Tezuka Osamu World (requires Flash, like this Astro Boy page in English). Osamu Tezuka is said to have seen Walt Disney's Bambi eighty times. Maybe that's not a precise count, but evidently WD was an influence. Eventually, things came full circle. Tezuka Osamu created Kimba the White Lion (or Jungle King, or Jungle Emperor), a B/W TV series, 1965-1966. (The lion's name in the original Japanese is Chimba. I guess they want to reserve that for a sequel about a chimp.) This index page links to Tomoyuki Tanaka's minor obsession with the apparent sincere flattery that Disney's Lion King paid to Jungle King.

I suspect that ``manga magazine'' is at least etymologically redundant. (A good glossary entry raises as many questions as it answers.)

According to the original story, Astro Boy was born at the Science Ministry on April 7, 2003. A new ``Tetsuwan Atom'' TV series premiered in Japan on April 6, 2003. SONY has been working on an Astro Boy movie now (March 2003) scheduled for release in fall 2004. The English name of the little robot, according to its Japanese creators, has generally been AstroBoy, spelled as one word, but only the more fastidious Anglophone fans spell it that way, and SONY apparently will use the two-word spelling.

astroturf lobbying
Institutional lobbying that dissimulates grass-roots lobbying.

AS-TTL
Advanced Schottky TTL. See AS entry.

ASU
German, Abgassonderuntersuchung. `Gas emission Special Investigation.' This is serious! AU is bad enough.

ASU
Appalachian State University. A school located in Boone, North Carolina. Don't ask ``what's that close to?'' It's close to the junction of state highways 321 and 421. It's close to a population of 10 thousand. On August 31, 2007, the 1-AA App State Mountaineers went into the University of Michigan's Big House and outplayed the home team, coming away with a 34-32 victory. It was a college football upset that finally eclipses Carnegie Tech over (the absent) Knute Rockne's Notre Dame team at Pittsburgh in 1926.

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ASU
Arizona State University. The main campus is in Tempe, southeast of Phoenix; cf. UA.) Tempe was so named because it reminded a founder of the Vale of Tempe. New York (the Empire State) was also settled by classicists, apparently.

In the late 1980's they opened a satellite campus in northwest Phoenix adjacent to Glendale -- ASU West. In the mid-nineties they opened an ASU East satellite in Mesa.

ASUCLA
The Associated Students UCLA. ``[T]he not-for-profit organization which operates the Student Union, Bookstores, Restaurants, and Trademarks & Licensing at UCLA.'' Banners hanging outside Ackerman (the student union) actually expand this in a declarative sentence: ``ASUCLA is the Associated Students UCLA.'' If they can afford a two-letter copula, why not a two-letter preposition? It's probably due to the severe cutbacks the UC system has suffered during California's budget crunch.

``Associated Students. Stuff you need since 1919.''

ASUM
Associated Students of the University of Montana. The student government at MUM.

asundatic
A variant spelling of asyndetic, the adjective corresponding to the noun asyndeton.

The Roman alphabet was adopted with negligible adaptations from the Etruscan, and the Etruscan alphabet was typical of the western Greek alphabets used on the Italian peninsula. The Etruscan letter U occupied the same place and apparently had about the same sound as the upsilon in the classical Greek alphabet. Over time, the Romans made a few adjustments. For example, as the gamma had become devoiced in many but not all contexts, the original letter (C) was recognized as having a new value regularly. That's why our a-b-c corresponds to alpha-beta-gamma. The old gamma sound was assigned to a new letter G (a modified form of C) which was placed in the seventh position, where the disused letter Z (Greek zeta) had been. They dropped some other letters, like phi and psi, that were kept in eastern Greek alphabets; they kept others, particularly digamma (F) and qoppa (Q), that the Greeks discarded.

When the Romans started adopting large amounts of Greek vocabulary, they adjusted to the alphabet mismatch in a couple of ways. For the aspirated consonants they deployed H to indicate aspiration. (Hence P for the consonant pi and PH for the consonant phi, K for kappa and CH for chi, etc. The H also stood for the breathing mark; hence ha for initial aspirated alpha, and rh for aspirated rho.) For fricatives the approach was mixed. The sound psi was represented by the consonant pair PS, but the sounds of xi and zeta, instead of being represented by the equivalent consonant pairs KS and DS, were represented by the letters X and Z, readopted or restored to the Roman alphabet. The situation with vowels was more complicated, as it usually is. Quantity distinctions (long and short in the old sense) originally distinguished in Greek (epsilon vs. eta, omicron vs. omega) were often (as is usual for Latin) not indicated. Diphthongs were used to represent some single-letter vowel sounds in Greek. These tricks were apparently not enough, and upsilon (the original of the U) was added to the Roman alphabet along with X and Z.

The historical identity of U and Y is often present to the mind of a classicist, however, so that even to this day, classicists writing Greek in Roman characters often use u in place of y. (Of course, a different form of U, originally used word-initially, was eventually retasked to represent the consonantal sound sometimes represented by U. With the duplicated form W, that makes four distinct modern letters from the original upsilon.)

ASUS
ASUSTeK Computer, Inc. It looks like an acronym, but the company was founded in Taiwan, and the letters A and (especially) U are strange initial letters for Chinese.

asuso
An archaic Spanish adverb meaning `up,' from the Latin ad sursum. Its place has been taken by arriba, from the Latin ad ripam.

asustar
Spanish verb meaning `to scare.'

ASUW
(Airborne) Anti-SUrface Warfare.

ASV
American Standard Version (of the Bible). The standard acronym is SARV, so look there instead, okay? ``American Standard'' makes enameled plumbing fixtures.

ASVAB
Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. As a point of comparison, perhaps, the mental qualification requirement for the USMC OCC or PLC program can be satisfied in any of three ways:
  • ACT score of 45 (Math + English)
  • SAT score of 1080 (Math + Verbal)
  • ASVAB EL score of 115,

ASVCP
American Society for Veterinary Clinical Pathologists. The ASVCP and ACVP hold a joint annual meeting.

ASVD
Analog Simultaneous Voice and Data.

ASVO
American Society of Veterinary Ophthalmology.

ASW
Anti-Submarine Warfare.

ASW
German, Außersinnliche Wahrnehmung. `Extra-sensory Perception' (ESP).

ASWB
Association of Social Work Boards. Formerly the AASSWB.

ASX
Australian Stock EXchange.

asyndeton
A list of items joined without any conjunction. A list of this sort is said to be asyndetic.

    Famous examples:
  1. Julius Caesar (laconic comment on swift successful campaign in Pontus, as recorded by Suetonius in Lives of the Caesars): veni, vidi, vici (Latin: `I came, I saw, I conquered.')
  2. Abraham Lincoln (closing words of Gettysburg Address, recorded by various newspaper reporters present): But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Asyndeton can have at least a couple of distinct effects, which we might call distillation and compression. In the examples from Lincoln above, it may impart a certain gravitas. The asyndetic phrases sound as if they have been purified of unimportant words, so what is left is distilled truth. In the example from Caesar, asyndeton achieves narrative compression. It helps encapsulate or summarize (one view of) the story, and it may suggest that nothing more need be said, or that success was such a foregone conclusion that nothing beyond a bald recitation of the elements is ultimately important.

There are various kinds of laconic moods and motives, and in less memorable instances, asyndeton may be used simply for a little rhetorical fillip. Use is a matter of taste. For reasons that I can't understand, I can't remember any really unmemorable instances of asyndeton, so I've had to contrive my own, one of which you can find at the ST:TOS entry.

A closely related idea is parataxis. Parataxis is the bald placement of statements without the connectives that normally signal the logical structure of an extended argument. A completely unrelated idea, but with a similar name, is adynaton.

AS/400
Advanced Series 400. Midsize IBM computer that has run the OS/400 operating system, which used an old-style host-and-dumb-terminal paradigm rather than a client/server paradigm. Now ``AS/400 Advanced Application Architecture'' is available.

AS56
Accunet Switched 56.

AT
Acceptance Test.

AT
Advanced Technology. Yesterday's AT is tomorrow's joke. You might gaze upon my works and despair. IBM's PC/AT is vintage 1984.

A.T., AT
German, Altes Testament. English, `Old Testament' (O.T.).

at
Anthropology Today. A journal published by Blackwell on behalf of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. The sister publication of at is JRAI.

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AT
Antiquité Tardive. Published by la Association pour l'Antiquité Tardive, it ``aims at enriching the study of written texts from the fourth to the seventh centuries by setting these into a wider context using a multidisciplinary approach covering history, archaeology, epigraphy, law and philology.'' Did I just read the word ``enriching''? Indeed I did. I also just read that the one issue per year costs 62 euros. At those prices it better have a centerfold, and she had better not be an antique.

At
Astatine, at atomic number 85 the heaviest known halogen. Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

at
German, Atmosphäre. English, `atmosphere.'

AT
ATtention. First code in a command-set protocol defined by Hayes for its modems and become the industry standard.

.at
(Domain code for) Austria. But for 1866 and 1945, this would be Germany (.de).

The US government's Country Studies website has a page of links (``Austria Country Studies'') amounting to the online version of its Austria book.

Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has a page of national links. There's an official government site (also in English).

Rec.Travel offers some links.

Telephone numbers for International direct dialing to Austria begin with 43.

ATA
Academic Theme Associate. University staff responsible for advancing the designated academic theme of a house (university residence). Cf. ETA, FA.

ATA
Actual Time of Arrival (of flight or of transport vehicle). In contrast with ETA.

ATA
Advanced Technology Attachment. A standard for interfacing disk drives. Nothing more than the name used by ANSI group X3T10 for Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE).

ATA
Air Transport Association. A trade group representing commercial airlines.

ATA
All-American Twirling Academy. ``The ATA All-Stars are located in Gainesville and Lake City, Florida. Group and private lessons are offered for age 4 through high school at all skill levels.''

ATA
American Teachers Association. Founded at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1904, on the initiative of John Robert Edward Lee of the Tuskegee Institute, as the National Association of Colored Teachers. The name was changed in 1907 to the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, to better reflect the target membership. The name was changed to American Teachers Association in 1937. In 1966, the ATA merged with the NEA. With luck, this page of ATA history won't be history itself at the end of February.

ATA
American Tinnitus Association.

ATA
American Trans Air. A commercial airline. In my experience flying from South Bend, Indiana, to the coasts, ATA offers the best last-minute deals through their hubs in Detroit and Chicago (Midway).

A lot of people wonder how it ended up with the not-very-mnemonic carrier code TZ. The answer is that by the time ATA got into the business (1973), all the more appropriate two-letter codes (AT, TA, TR) were taken.

Getting into the business just before deregulation, ATA is sort of a 'tween company: it doesn't have the high costs of the old-line major passenger airlines, but not the low costs of a Southwest or JetBlue. They also don't have the name recognition of the majors. Around 2002, I encountered a travel agent at AAA in New Jersey who had never heard of it. After we finished booking on ATA, he had the cojones to tell us cheerfully that we saved 1,800 or whatever dollars -- sure, no thanks to him.

ATA was the tenth-largest US carrier in 2004, ranking by passenger miles. I think ATA needs to invest in more advertising. In late October 2004 they filed for bankruptcy. Also, they're now ``ATA Airlines.'' This is supposed not to be pleonastic because ATA is no longer an acronym, just a name -- sort of a decorative collection of letters, like Kodak, but pronounced ``ayteeay.'' It's as if they had a little switch attached to the language, which turns the significance of an established usage off when flipped and prevents their name from having an expansion that ends in ``Air Airlines.'' At least they didn't claim ATA now stands for the word father translated into TURKISH.

One can sympathize with the company's name problems: air and trans are as vanilla as airline word names get (as also American, in the US), and the lack of a distinctive name is probably part of their visibility problem. Indeed, as part of their bankruptcy restructuring, they were originally expecting to sell most of their main hub facilities at Midway to AirTran Airways, a low-cost carrier founded in 1993. Eventually, Southwest won the bidding war, in an agreement to buy the lease rights to six gates at Midway. The agreement involves some cash, transfer of a hangar at Midway, and very significantly a code-share agreement, the first for both ATA and Southwest. ATA will make Indianapolis, previously a secondary hub, the new center of its operations.

ATA
American Translators Association. Cf. ALTA (L is for Literary).

ATA
American Trucking Associations [sic, plural], Inc. A national trade association. Their Management Systems Council (MSC) has a web page. The other large trucking-industry trade association is the TCA.

ata
`Father,' in various Central Asian languages. Cf. atta.

The father of modern Turkey was given the single name Mustafa at birth (1881, in Salonica). A mathematics teacher bestowed the name Kemal (`perfection') on him, and it was as ``Mustafa Kemal'' that he entered a military academy in 1895. After his graduation as a lieutenant in 1905 he was posted to Damascus, where he formed a secret society of anti-royalist (i.e., anti-Ottoman), reform-minded officers called Vatan (`Fatherland'). Other stuff happened that is not relevant to this entry. Let's just say that Mustafa Kemal was to Turkey everything Charles de Gaulle could have wanted to be for France. In 1934, he promulgated a law requiring all Turks to adopt surnames, and the Grand National Assembly gave him the surname of Atatürk, `father of Turks.'

Alma-Ata (now ``Almaty,'' grumble grumble) is the largest city in Kazakhstan. The name means `father of apples.'

ata
`You,' in Hebrew (stress as usual on the final syllable).

ATAA
Assembly of Turkish American Associations.

atap
The nipa palm tree. It grows throughout the Scrabble forest.

ATAPI
AT Attachment Packet Interface. Similar to SCSI. (Cf. ATA supra.)

atari
Japanese:
  1. n. `target'
  2. interj. `on target, dead on, that's right.'

Also, there's a brand of orphan computers called Atari. At least there's an FAQ for the eight-bit machines, from the <comp.sys.atari.8bit> newsgroup. We also serve a little bit on the operating system.

ATAS
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. What's wrong with this picture?

ATAS was founded in 1946 and is based in the Los Angeles area. It presents the annual prime time Emmy awards, offers other events in its LA headquarters, and publishes Emmy magazine. The similarly named National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) is a distinct organization based in New York. Oddly enough, NATAS is a national organization, with chapters around the US (20, as of 2004). NATAS handles the Daytime, US News, and Documentary Emmys. Sports is subsumed in one or more of those categories. NATAS chapters handle Regional Emmy Awards. Enough! PLEASE! What do you think this is, some kind of general reference encyclopedic dictionary? We're just interested in acronyms (and initialisms and abbreviations and some necessary related explanatory entries). All I ever wanted to know was, did ``Emmy'' originally stand for M.E.? (Cf. emcee.) Ah! I found an answer. (No, I'm not going to tell you here. That wouldn't be efficient. You have to follow the link.)

The NYC-based NATAS has a regional chapter based in NYC: NY-NATAS. ATAS, in addition to being a ``sister organization'' to NATAS, also serves as one of its regional chapters. This begins to sound like incest. Buy the rights, it could be a hit. There's also a IATAS, which awards International Emmys (iEmmys). IATAS is a division of NATAS. It may be possible to draw the organization chart in two dimensions, but it can't be a good idea.

ATB
All-Terrain Bicycle. Less common synonym of MTB.

ATB, atb
All The Best. Chatese, texting abbreviation.

ATBM
Anti-Theater Ballistic Missile.

A few are still kept targeted at Broadway, although that is no longer considered a serious threat (vide ATW). People have been saying for over fifty years that Broadway is chatting with death's valet. People have probably been right, but musicals still animate the body.

ATBM can also be synonymously expanded as Anti-Tactical Ballistic Missile. Again, as with ABM, confusion arises from the fact that hyphenation is not explicitly nested: ATBM is anti the TBM. These are not ballistic missiles directed against tactics, except insofar as those tactics take the form of the firing of tactical ballistic missiles. Evidently, the end of the cold war has had collateral linguistic benefits.

AT Bus
Variant name for ISA bus.

ATC
Accelerated Thermal Cycling.

ATC
Address Translation Cache.

ATC
Air Traffic Control. Productive prefix (ATCA, ATCAA, ATCBI, ATCRBS, ATCS, ATCSCC, ATCT).

ATC
``All Things Considered.'' National Public Radio Program that needs some new theme music.

ATC
Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical.

ATC
Arquitectura y Tecnología de Computadores. [In Spanish, there has been a major struggle between ``Computador'' and ``Ordenador.'' (The latter follows French usage.) An important reason to avoid using ``computador'' is that a verb form naturally associated with that is ``computa.'' In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift has some fun with something similar, turning over in his thought various unsatisfactory alternative etymologies of ``Laputa,'' the name of the floating island. It is less important to know that in the Italian dub of ``Last Tango in Paris'' (``Ultimo Tango a Parigi'') Marlon Brando's character calls Maria Schneider's ``putana,'' but we tell you anyway.] If you're confused, read through to the end of the Pav entry. (To save time, you can start at the beginning of the Pav entry. To save frustration, wait until I publish the entry.)

According to the Computer Spanglish Diccionario, a useful resource served by Yolanda M. Rivas, ordenador is seldom used.

ATC
Audio TeleConferenc{ing|e}.

ATC
Australian Transputer Centre.

ATC
Automat{ ic | ed } Traction Control.

ATC
Automatic Train Control.

ATC
Average Total Cost.

ATC
Azienda Trasporti Consorziali.

ATCA
Air Traffic Control Association.

ATCAA
Air Traffic Control Assigned Airspace.

ATCBI
Air Traffic Control Beacon Interrogator.

ATCI
The Association of [the] Thai Computer Industry.

ATCM
Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting.

ATCo
Air Traffic Controller.

ATCRBS
Air Traffic Control Radar Beacon System.

ATCS
Advanced Train Control Systems.

ATCS
Air Traffic Control {Specialist | System}.

ATCSCC
Air Traffic Control Systems Command Center. Operational since 1994.

ATCT
Air Traffic Control Tower.

ATD
Air Transport Division of the Transport Workers Union (TWU). It represents airline mechanics and ground crew.

ATD
Advanced Technical Demonstration.

ATD
Automatic Thermal Desorption (TD).

ATDC
Address Transition Detection Circuit.

aTDC, ATDC, atdc
After Top Dead Center. See TDC.

ATDM
Asynchronous Time-Division Multiplexing.

ATDT
ATtention Dial Tone. Hayes modem AT command.

ATE
Advanced Technological Education. A joint program of the Divisions of Undergraduate Education and of Elementary, Secondary, and Informal Education of the NSF, ``promotes exemplary improvement in advanced technological education ....''

ATE
Automat{ ic | ed } Test Equipment. For external circuit testing. Cost in the megabuck range. See, for example, Teradyne's Semiconductor Test Division.

ATF
(Bureau of) Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The ``revenooers.'' More at BATF.

ATFCA
Australian Track & Field Coaches Association.

ATG
Albert The Great. Albertus Magnus. There's an unintentionally funny site hawking his out-of-copyright-by-now works, at <http://www.AlbertTheGreat.Com/>.

(``Please make payment in advance to receive over 40 volumes of truth'' from ``First Floor Rear'' somewhere in Pennsylvania.)

Albertus Magnus, a Dominican priest (OP), died in 1280; he was canonized and declared a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church some time later (1931). In 1941, Pope Pius XII declared him the patron of all those who devote themselves to the natural sciences.

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ATG
Alexander The Great.

ATG
Automatic Test Generation.

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Ath.
Athenaeus.

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ATH, ath, Ath.
ATHlete. A symbol or abbreviation used in lieu of a specific football position. Read the athlete entry below and you'll know at least as much as I do on the subject.

ATHAS
Advanced THermal Analysis System.

atheism
A lot more people would be atheists if they didn't think that God would disapprove.

Athens
A town in Alabama (home of Athens State University, founded in 1822, and... it's a county seat!), Arkansas, California, Georgia (home of UGA, the oldest state-chartered university in the US, and another county seat!), Illinois, Indiana (the University of Indianapolis has an Athens campus, but it's in Greece), Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, Ohio (county seat, and home of Ohio's first state university), Pennsylvania, Tennessee (it's a county seat!), Texas (seat of a different county!), Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia (in Mercer County, where Princeton, naturally, is the county seat; I've been there), and Wisconsin. That's twenty-two states, and not a few college towns.

In fact, Tennessee has two Athenses, because Nashville is known locally as ``the Athens of the South.'' In an article about the South that was published in 1962 (``You-All and Non-You-All,'' described within the U and non-U entry), Jessica Mitford wondered puckishly ``whether Athenians ever think of their city as `the Nashville of Greece.' '' For a similar idea, based on Emory University's self-assumed status as a ``Harvard of the South,'' see the this S.P.D. entry.

Adelaide, capital of the state of South Australia, is also known locally as the ``Athens of the South.''

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athlete
I just noticed a specialized use of this word. It apparently designates a football player without a single specific position, but I don't feel competent to give a certain definition, so I'll just cite a couple of instances.

The back page of Notre Dame's student newspaper (The Observer) had a graphic that included this text: ``23 players signed letters of intent: 12 offense, 9 defense, 2 athletes.'' (My italics; otherwise, I've sedated the fonts and capitalization for readability. This was from the issue of February 4, 2010, the day after National Signing Day 2010. National Signing Day is the earliest date when student athletes may sign national letters of intent. There will be more about it at the link, once I sort some of it out.)

The previous evening, an article on the website of the Huntington, W.Va., Herald-Dispatch reported the letter-of-intent pickings of Marshall University (the local Division-I school). The article included this: ``Quarterback Ed Sullivan [he wants to be in the ``big shoe,'' no doubt] and athletes Jermaine Kelson, Antwon Chisholm, Jazz King and [Harold `Gator'] Hoskins ranked among Marshall recruits who opted for Huntington over BCS teams. The Thundering Herd also added considerable bulk along the line of scrimmage, signing five offensive and defensive players to bolster the front.''

A list at the foot of the Herald-Dispatch article included position codes and other information. Those described as ``athletes'' in the body of the article had the position code ``ATH.'' The student athletes (a general term) were listed in no particular order that I could discern. Anyway, here are the position codes, in order of their first occurrence in the list, along with the number of players with that designation, along with their average heights and weights:

  Position    #       height  weight (in lb.)
     QB       1       6'2"      195
     K        1       5'10"     175
     OL       3       6'4.7"    283
     ATH      5       5'10.6"   180
     DB       3       5'11.7"   177.7
     LB       2       6'2"      207.5
     DE       3       6'4.3"    245
     DT       2       6'4"      275
     TE       2       6'4.5"    210
     WR       3       6'0"      181.7

It turns out that ATH, Ath, or ath is very widely used in this context. FWIW, there don't seem to be any specific codes for special-teams positions. The ATH players aren't always relatively small. Oh, and I found an authority (Bob -- a guard... in the Notre Dame library, working beneath Touchdown Jesus!) who explained that ``an athlete'' is someone who can play more than one position. There are position names for the special teams, but everyone on those teams has a position on the main offensive or defensive team -- sort of like a day job.

athleticism
This entry is under construction. What that means is that I've got my feet propped up on the desk and I'm looking out the window, trying to come up with a good pun on atheism when I should be doing real work instead.

athletic shoe
This entry is under construction. But hey, we've already got a head term. Well-started is half done, so I'd say the entry is about 45% complete. The hang-up is with bowling shoes: are bowling shoes not athletic shoes because they have slippery soles, or are they not athletic shoes because bowling is not a sport? And how can I finish the entry if I don't know? How will I know if I don't do the research, and how will I do the research without funding? Send money now!

And shouldn't it be the foot rather than the shoe that is called athletic? The shoe should be an ``athlete's shoe,'' but instead we have ``athlete's foot'' and ``athletic shoe.'' This isn't working right: the more I write, the more incomplete this entry gets. You know, when people say they have to run just to stay in one place, I look at their running shoes and think: if you want to get anywhere, maybe you should run the other way. If I erased this entry completely, I'd be done. Cf. sneaker.

Just to incomplete this entry more completely, I'd like to add that the odd attribution of athleticism to a shoe reminds one of homebuilding. (Well, okay, it just reminds me, but since I am one, it reminds one.) Specifically, rich folks will say something like ``I built this house in 1997'' when all they mean is that they hired a general contractor in 1996. At least with similarly misattributed corporate research and claimed accomplishments, no one doubts that the actual work was performed by humans and machines with individual identities distinct from that of the corporation. Nevertheless, have a gander at the GE entry. (Starship's ``We Built This City (on Rock and Roll)'' gets a free pass because attempting to parse rock lyrics dissolves the brain. Marconi plays the mamba. Oh noooo!)

ATHS
American Truck Historical Society. ``Incorporated in 1971, the not-for-profit American Truck Historical Society was formed to preserve the history of trucks, the trucking industry, and its pioneers.''

aths, Aths, ATHS
Australian Tuchas for Huchas Society. My best guess, anyway. Okay, here's another try:

ATHlet{e|ic}S. An abbreviation particularly common in Australia, where -- in keeping with Fowler's worst suggestion and widespread UK and Oz practice -- abbreviations are frequently written without a closing period. (There is no Australian organization, so far as I have been able to determine in way too much time devoted to the search, whose initialism is ATHS.)

ATI
Addiction Treatment Inventory. A questionnaire created by TRI for drug treatment centers to report statistical data describing their programs. Used by DENS.

ATIC
Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter. A balloon-borne cosmic-ray detector.

ATIN
Adoption Taxpayer Identification Number. Here's an explanation from the 2004 edition of IRS publication 17 (Your Federal Income Tax: For Individuals), p. 15:
If you are in the process of adopting a child who is a U.S. citizen or resident and cannot get an SSN for the child [or an ITIN either] until the adoption is final, you can apply for an ATIN to use instead of an SSN.

Use form W-7A. (An ATIN is only assigned if the child has already been placed in the return-filer's home and can be claimed as a dependent. An SSN must be applied for and used as soon as possible afterwards, and use of the ATIN discontinued.)

ATIP
Asian Technology Information Program. ``[A] non-profit organization dedicated to providing objective and high-quality information about technology developments in Asia.'' (Link above is to US server; http://www.atip.or.jp/ is in Tokyo.)

ATIRCM
Advanced Threat InfraRed CounterMeasures (IRCM).

ATIS
Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions. Previously called ECSA.

ATJ
Association of Teachers of Japanese. That URL is more permanent than it looks, but if it ever dies, the link to ATJ from <japaneseteaching.org/> will probably be kept current.

atl
Isn't that the Nahuatl word for water? Could be. I'll have to check.

Hmmm. So it is. And a lot of folks have come up with interesting speculations connecting Atlantis with the Nahuatl word atl and tlan, which isn't a word in Nahuatl but occurs in a bunch of names. Doubtless these connections are at least as significant as various other observed coincidences.

ATL
Active Template Library. For Microsoft Windows; used in creating server-side components and ActiveX controls.

ATL
Association of Teachers and Lecturers.

ATL
IATA abbreviation for what used to be Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport. Now it's Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. They extended the subway system connecting the gates and main terminal straight through to Mississippi and... Hmmm, let me check this. Okay, they added ``Jackson'' some time after the death in June 2003 of Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of the city of Atlanta (he was first elected in 1973). He was active in the major expansion of Hartsfield, which was completed ``on time and under budget'' during his second term. (The quotation marks are standard, apparently because it was a phrase he took pride in repeating.) The ``Hartsfield'' honored an earlier mayor, William Hartsfield.

ATLA
American Theological Library Association. Good places to go and read comforting things after you've received reading matter from the next ATLA.

ATLA
Association of Trial Lawyers of America.

The trial lawyers have evidently recognized that ``trial lawyer'' is not a term with positive associations. The organization has been rebranded the ``American Association for Justice'' (AAJ).

I believe it was one of the Oliver Wendell Holmeses who remarked that there is no more trying experience than undergoing a trial. I don't think it was a tautological pun. I do imagine it was the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who remarked this. Holmes Senior, the doctor, practiced in the days before modern anesthetics.

Atlantic Monthly
What can I say? I won't pretend that it's the acronym expansion of ``AM'' or ``AMM.'' Even I have standards.

It was founded in 1857, so it has seen its share of ups and downs. The first years of the 21st century have been downs. Visit.

Edward Weeks was the editor from 1938 to 1966.

ATLAS
Abbreviated Test Language for All Systems. Used for test specification and test programming. IEEE standard 716. It's about the fourth item on this long page.

ATLAS
Argonne Tandem-Linac Accelerator System. Since LINAC stands for ``linear accelerator,'' one may regard ``ATLAS'' as an abbreviation of ``Argonne Tandem-Linear-Accelerator Accelerator System.'' That is an example of what we here at SBF call an AAP pleonasm (this stands for ``acronym-assisted pleonasm pleonasm'').

One would naturally expect ``ATLAS System'' as an AAP pleonasm pleonasm for ATLAS. This occurs, of course, but the AAP-assisted ``ATLAS accelerator'' pleonasm is much more common. One can also find higher-order-redundant pleonastic redundancies of higher order, like ``ATLAS LINAC accelerator at Argonne.'' ATLAS has 62 resonators.

ATLAS
A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS. Name of one of the six particle-detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The ATLAS collaboration was formed in 1992 when the proposed EAGLE (Experiment for Accurate Gamma, Lepton and Energy Measurements) and ASCOT (Apparatus with SuperCOnducting Toroids) collaborations merged their efforts into building a single, general-purpose particle detector for the LHC.

at least as good as
No worse than. (Doesn't sound so good that way, does it?)

ATM
Adobe Type Manager.

ATM
Air Traffic Management.

ATM
Amateur Telescope Maker.

ATM
Association of Teachers of Mathematics. UK organization; nearly 4000 members concerned with mathematical education in primary schools, secondary schools, colleges, polytechnics and universities.

ATM
Asynchronous Transfer Mode. A nontechnical introduction is available from the ATM Forum; the text within the gifs is hard to read.

ATM passes information in 53-byte cells consisting of 48 bytes of payload and 5 bytes of header. It's defined for 155Mbit/second data rates and faster. See also SDH.

ATM
A tod{a|o} madre. This is a common Mexican slang expression roughly equivalent to the interjection `awesome!' The initialism occurs in graffiti or wherever else one might write it, but in speech the unabbreviated words are used. At the most basic level of grammar, the form with toda would be correct, since madre is (grammatically as well as naturally) female. In practice, todo is common.

The phrase can be translated as `at full mother,' on the pattern of expressions like a toda velocidad (`at full speed'). The phrase doesn't make any more literal sense in Spanish than the translation does in English. From time to time over the past few years I've asked various Mexicans what sense they could make of the phrase, and never gotten more than admittedly ignorant speculation. It's just an idiom.

ATM
At The Moment.

ATM
Automat{ed|ic} Teller Machine. So far, only bank tellers, not fortune tellers. Okay, I'll have to think about that.

The first ATM was inaugurated in London on a Tuesday, June 27, 1967. It was apparently called an ``automated cash dispenser'' at the time. I read this in an article by James Hudnut-Beumer. He's a professor of of American religious history at Vanderbilt University, and the article, published June 21, 2017, in The Conversation, is

``Why cash remains sacred in American churches.''

It never would have occurred to me to ask the question, but I was interested to read there that Marty Baker, pastor of the Stevens Creek Church in Augusta, Georgia, is widely credited as the first to install an ATM inside a church. He installed two of them in the church lobby in 2005. Not one to do things by halves, apparently. These ATM's are also known as ``giving kiosks.'' It's striking how equivocal the verb derivatives can be -- dispense cash or dispense with cash, Kiosks that give cash or kiosks for giving, or forgiving or cash for dispensation?

Marty Baker saw that it was good, so he founded SecureGive, a for-profit company that makes and manages giving kiosks of many different persuasions. The term ``ATM,'' having been replaced in this context, has apparently been repurposed with the new expansion ``Automatic Tithing Machine,'' for a kind of giving kiosk that transfers funds directly from the giver's account into the church's. Some users place their ATM receipts in the plate (or pouch or slot or whatever) at the appropriate time in the service.

Now let's discuss some ethical, um, issues. If you write or say ``ATM machine,'' then you are a bad person. In principle, it's okay just to think it, but bad thoughts lead to bad actions, so keep that in mind. If you want to be a very bad person and burn in hell forever, say ``Automatic ATM Machine'' (the teller is silent).

ATM
Automatic Tithing Machine. Explained in previous entry.

ATM
Azienda Trasporti Municipali. Transit in Milano, Italy.

ATMARP
Asynchronous Transfer Mode Address Resolution Protocol.

ATM-DXI
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)-Data eXchange Interface (DXI)

atmosphere
A unit of pressure [abbrev. atm.] equal to 105,350 Pa. Vide bar.

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ATMS
Automated (Telephone) Trunk Measurement System.

ATN
Aeronautical Telecommunications Network.

ATN
Augmented Transition Network (parser).

ATO
Abort To Orbit. Space shuttle landing abort plan; AOA, RTLS, and TAL are other options.

ATO
Actual Time Over. Actual as opposed to targeted or predicted time that an aircraft passes a coordination point.

ATO
Australian Taxation Office.

ATO
Automatic Train Operation.

ATOC
Association of Train Operating Companies. ``[A]n unincorporated association owned by its members. It was set up by the train operating companies formed during the privatisation of [UK] railways under the Railways Act 1993.''

ATOK
Automatic Transfer Of Kana kanji. Kana is the Japanese syllabary, with about 95 characters -- hiragana and katakana (about 145 including diacriticals). Kanji are Chinese characters used in Japanese (a few thousand).

atomic mass
Physicists' term meaning mass of an atom, when the mass is given in amu (atomic mass units). Totally different from atomic weight, you understand, although quantitatively identical.

atomic names
Given names without accepted shorter form. What is ``accepted'' is, of course, a matter of opinion.) Many atomic names, such as Drew, Joe, Ron, Sam, and Tom, are short or diminutive forms of other names. Since every name that is not itself atomic must by definition have an accepted form that is shorter, and given the usual mathematical facts about phonemes, every name must be or yield at least one atomic name. Some of these are probably only rarely given names themselves, since there does seem to continue to be a tendency to avoid giving legal names that are primarily used as nicknames based on other names. Aargh! Why does everything have to get so complicated when you think about it? I really only wanted to mention traditional atomic names like Kim, Lee, and Saul.

For obvious reasons, atomic names tend to be monosyllabic. Aaron and Oscar are pretty solid exceptions, although I knew an automobile repairman who used ``Os'' for the latter.

A semiconductor physicist of my acquaintance was upset when his granddaughter was given the non-atomic (molecular?) name ``Candace.'' He feared she would end up being called ``Candy,'' not be taken seriously as a student in school, drop out, and lead an miserably unambitious, unliberated existence. This is only a slightly extreme version of the theory that Nomenclature is Destiny. (Following that link you can find another kind of atomic name: Atom Egoyan.)

atomic number
The number of protons in a nucleus. Physicists abbreviate this by the capital letter Z.

atomic weight
Chemists' term, short for relative atomic weight. The atomic weight of a chemical substance is one twelfth of the weight in grams of one mole of the substance, divided by the weight in grams of one mole of carbon atoms. Because of the principle of equivalence (even just the weak principle of equivalence), this ratio is the same at any altitude, so it's practically a measure of mass.

Physicists define a quantity that is one twelfth the mass of a carbon atom. (Or, if you prefer, defined as one twelfth the mass of a mole of carbon atoms, divided by Avogadro's number, which is the number of carbon atoms in a mole of carbon atoms.) Since a ratio of masses equals the corresponding ratio of weights (principle of equivalence, remember?) the mass of an atom of some element (its atomic mass), given in amu, equals the atomic weight of the element.

Physicists prefer to distinguish mass and force (weight), so in contexts typically described or analyzed in physical terms, one tends to see the atomic mass term. (These contexts are more likely to be in solid, surface, interface, gas, or plasma phase, and to depend on detailed dynamics of individual particles matter. Typical instance: atomic mass spectroscopy.) Chemists tend to deal primarily with weights, and in chemical contexts, one sees atomic weight. (Chemical contexts are predominantly liquid-phase, typically involving macroscopic numbers of particles. Any situation involving a molecular species or chemical reaction is likely to be analyzed in chemical terms.) It is, of course, impossible to define a sharp boundary between chemical and physical contexts or approaches. To some extent, the distinction is one of conceptual approach, even when the substantive situation is the same, and has more to do with pedagogical traditions in the different disciplines than with any great difference in effectiveness.

ATOMIS
Asynchronous Transfer mode (ATM)-Oriented Multimedia Information System.

Atoms in the Family
The title of a book by Laura Fermi (neé Capon) about her husband Enrico, the famous physicist who died in 1954. The book was published that year by the University of Chicago Press. As Laura explained in the acknowledgments, it was Dr. Cyril Smith who gave her the idea for the book.
``You should write your husband's biography,'' he told me. ``I cannot,'' I answered. ``My husband is the man I cook for and iron shirts for. How can I take him that seriously?''

Fermi is one of my favorite physicists, and this is one of my favorite books.

atom smasher
Atoms are very small. I guess that's why they're so hard to smash. I may have something to say here later about cyclotrons and other accelerators, but for now I just wanted to have this entry here for a quote.

Interviewed at a training session in Las Vegas, ahead of a non-title bout February 22, 2003, 36-year-old juvenile delinquent Mike Tyson was being philosophical about his bad-boy image: ``Every religion has a saying about throwing stones in glass houses. I can't throw a sand pebble. I can't spit, I can't throw an atom at nobody.'' (This and other reflective contemplations in the London Independent, February 10, 2003. More about this fascinating creature at the bite me entry, coming soon.)

atonal music
Music that has tones, alright, but no key -- or many. Sounds like it keeps slipping a cog. Generally associated with the name of Schönberg, but it was pioneered by Liszt as early as the 1830's. Schönberg (1874-1951) had to emigrate to the US to escape the Nazis, and the separation from even that small audience that could appreciate his work was a living death.

ATP
Absolute Thermoelectric Power.

ATP
Acceptance Test Plan.

ATP
Adenosine TriPhosphate. A kind of biological fuel for internal transport in a biological cell. Energy is stored in ADP by adding a phosphate group, and extracted by removing it, elsewhere, from the product ATP. In a pinch, you can extract a bit more energy from ADP by removing another phosphate group and leaving AMP.

ATP
Advanced TurboProp. Made by British Aerospace. As of this writing (8/1996), United Express flies these critters from O'Hare to South Bend seven (7) times a day. Total flight time is only 25 minutes. Most of them are only four or five years old, so you have pretty favorable odds of arriving.

ATP
Airline Transport Pilot. Highest grade of pilot certificate.

ATP
All Tests Pass.

ATP
Alternate Transient Program. A version of Electromagnetic Transient Program (EMTP), a standard code for real-time simulation of power systems including single-phase and three-phase balanced and unbalanced circuit modeling, various equivalent-circuit models for T-lines, and time-dependent models for simulating circuit breakers, lightning arrestors, and faults. Considered user-inimical.

ATP
Appletalk Transaction Protocol.

ATP
Application Transaction { Protocol | Program }.

ATP
Association of Tennis Professionals.

ATP
Authority To Proceed. Granted by Air Traffic Control.

ATP
Automatic Train Protection. A system used on some British railway lines. The system determines a maximum safe speed for the train and applies the brakes if that speed is exceeded. There were plans to install it widely in the 1990's, but costs proved greater than expected.

ATPA
American Technological Preeminence Act.

Gee, you don't think this wording will offend anyone? Nah -- I checked it out. All our constituents are fine with it.

ATPAM
Association of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers. Members of this trade union are not strictly required to be theatrical themselves; they just serve as publicists and managers of theater productions -- which productions are themselves theatrical in some sense of the word.

You wanted that spelled out.

ATPG
Automatic Test-Pattern Generation.

ATPM
Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine. Founded in 1942, it's ``the national association supporting health promotion and disease prevention educators and researchers.... ATPM members also include members of the Association of Preventive Medicine Residents.''

ATPS
AppleTalk Print Services.

ATR
Americans for Tax Reform. A group that wants taxes reduced. It's not officially affiliated with the GOP.

You know, this entry used to read

``Americans for Tax Reform. A group not officially affiliated with the GOP that wants taxes reduced.''

That was funnier, but the edited entry is better because we want to serve browsers who visit us with precise and unambiguous definitions.

ATR
Attenuated Total Reflection.

ATR
AGS To RHIC.

ATR
Authorization To Recruit.

ATR
Automat{ed|ic} Target Recogni{tion|zer}.

Remember in Robocop, that behemoth with machine guns that required some adjustment?

ATRA
Assistive Technology Resource Alliance.

ATRAC
Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding.

ATRP
Atom-Transfer Radical Polymerization.

ATS
Abstract Test Suite.

ATS
(FAA) Air Traffic Services.

ATS
Asian Test Symposium.

ATS
Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada.

They're in the accreditation business. That could get interesting.

ATS
Auxiliary Territorial Service. A British something or other founded in 1941.

ATSC
Advanced Television Systems Committee. ``ATSC was formed by the Joint Committee on Inter-Society Coordination (JCIC) to establish voluntary technical standards for advanced television systems, including digital high definition television (HDTV). ATSC suggests positions to the Department of State for their use in international standards organizations. ATSC proposes standards to the Federal Communications Commission.''

ATSC
Australian Telecommunication Standardisation Committee.

ATSDR
Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

AT&SF RR
Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe RailRoad (RR).

ATSIC
(Australia's) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

ATSIC was created in 1990 by the Labor government of Hawke. During parliamentary discussion of the ATSIC Act in 1989, MP John Howard said that establishing ATSIC would be ``sheer national idiocy'' and described ATSIC as a ``black Parliament.'' As PM in 2004, he's getting his opportunity to replace it. It's a fascinating story, so now you know what to look out for.

ATSIS
(Australia's) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services. In April 2003, this new government agency was created by Philip Ruddock (then the indigenous affairs minister). This agency was to manage ATSIC's budget under policy direction from ATSIC's elected leaders.

att
Laotian monetary unit. But what would you buy with it?

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ATT, AT&T
American Telephone and Telegraph [Company].

atta
Gothic for `father.' The first sentence of the Lord's Prayer in Gothic is
Atta unsar þu in himinam, weihnái namô þein;.

Attila (ca. 406-453), was the last and most powerful king of the Hun empire. His fame was such that he remains famous (in Hungary and Turkey) and infamous (in the rest of the West) to this day. His name remains a popular boy's given name today in Hungary and (also as Atilla) in Turkey. The last of his many wives was named Ildikó, and that name is still used in Hungary today. The wife of a colleague from Hungary has that name, and she explained its origin to me with pride. (But maybe she just enjoys the expected shock value.)

Ildikó was a Goth, and he died shortly after marrying her. Historians tend to trust the reports of Priscus, a historian who traveled with Maximin on an embassy from Theodosius II in 448. According to Priscus, he died on the night after a feast celebrating that last marriage. After he was buried with rich funeral objects, his funeral party was killed to keep his burial place secret. Let's review: a man of moderate dietary habits, in his mid-forties, apparently healthy and with everything in the world to live for, gets a nosebleed and chokes to death. Many are dead and no one alive will admit he attended the funeral. This doesn't sound suspicious? ``The Scourge of God'' didn't have any enemies? Other reports say one or another of his wives killed him, but the reports that have come down to us are not contemporary. If only Dan Rather would give us his gut sense of the matter, then we could be sure.

The Hun empire included many Goths, and in the Gothic language, Attila can be understood as `little father.' Ata or Atta is also a common word for `father' in various Central Asian or at least Turkic languages (see ata), and in one or another of these Attila may mean `land-father.' There are other possibilities. You could look it up.

Stalin, another fellow with some blood on his hands, was known by the epithet of ``little father.'' In Romanian, that was tatucul. Here I guess we see the diminutive ending -cul preserved from Latin. According to the W. Meyer-Lübke Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, the Romanian word tata, meaning `father,' has cognates in many Romance languages, though not in Latin. The meaning in some of these other languages is familial but varies. In Old Romanian taica meant `older sibling, advisor to young maidens,' and some tata cognates have referred variously to a younger sibling, older sibling, maiden, etc. Come to think of it, I've heard ``tatas'' used in English. It had something to do with mamas, iirc. Let me look that up in a slang dictionary... oh! I guess I don't want to go there.

There's a cognate of tata that also meant `father' in Lombardic. This was the language of a West Germanic tribe that settled in northern Italy and ended up speaking a version of Romance with little Germanic vocabulary left in it, so this is a weak reed to support a Germanic etymology. The Meyer-Lübke doesn't draw any connection to East Germanic (i.e., Gothic) or other pre-Romance languages. It seems very hung up on the idea that the initial vowel would not have been elided. In the instance of one Romance tata variant [(l)ata], it suggests a possible connection with the word ätti in Swiss German (i.e., one of the local varieties of German spoken in Switzerland). I have one thing to say to these crazy linguists: get your head out of your ass!

Before Stalin, and before he himself had much blood on his own hands, Tsar Nicholas II was known as the little father. His enemy Nestor Makhnos (a bloody anarchist military commander) was given the nickname batko by his men; this meant `little father.'

When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, his younger brother Bobby Kennedy served as campaign manager. He was rather bossy with the campaign staff, who used to say ``Little Brother is Watching You.'' (I just figured I'd throw that in there for a little comic relief, so it's not all about dictatorial leaders or bloody assassinations.)

Okay now, back to that earlier Scourge of God. The stress in the English pronunciation of Attila is on the second syllable, but in Gothic and in modern Serbo-Croatian it is on the first syllable. All the continental German forms of the name apparently have initial stress.

Middle High German documents from around 1200 record Attila's name as Etzel. This represents two systematic sound shifts: (1) umlaut, specifically assimilation of a to i (yes, even though the vowels were originally separated by a consonant; that's how umlaut works), and (b) affrication of the voiceless stop /t/ into /ts/, part of the second Germanic sound shift (LV). Attila's name provides one bit of evidence that, in at least one High Germanic dialect, the LV2 process had not ended by about 450. Taken all together, the various bits of evidence suggest that LV2 began spreading from the southern extreme of the West Germanic region in the sixth century (probably from Lombardy, when the Lombards still spoke a Germanic language).

Etzel became an important character in medieval German folklore. Edsel is a variant form of the name. The most famous person to bear it in modern times was Edsel Ford, son of the Henry Ford who founded the car company named after himself. When the company introduced a new line of cars in the late 1950's, they got the name Edsel. The line flopped infamously, and the name Edsel came to stand for commercial failure. Studies later showed that one of the many reasons it failed was a public perception of the Edsel name as odd. Naming the the new line ``Attila'' or something else better known would probably not have helped much, however: the line was introduced at the start of a recession that killed off the Nash, Packard, Hudson, and DeSoto marques, and left one or two others mortally wounded.

The Ford family was partly of Dutch or Flemish descent, but if there is a particular reason for the choice of name, it is not publicly known. There have been reports that the Ford family was opposed to using Edsel as the name of a car line, but their objections can't have been too strong. The company had been family-owned, only becoming a publicly traded corporation in 1956, but the Ford family has retained a controlling interest to this day (July 24, 2005, if you must know). The company had great trouble choosing a name, even going so far as to solicit some famously terrible suggestions from the famous poet Marianne Moore (``The Intelligent Whale,'' ``The Utopian Turtletop,'' ``The Pastelogram,'' ``The Mongoose Civique''). Plato was right about poets. At the meeting that chose the name, Ernest Breech stepped into the breach. Chairing the meeting in the absence of Henry Ford II, he urged the adoption of Edsel, name of the company's second president.

ATTF
Agence de Transfert de Technologie Financière. ``ATTF Luxembourg was created in 1999 by the State of the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg (Ministry of Finance) - main shareholder, the Central Bank of Luxembourg (BCL), the Chamber of Commerce of the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg, the Financial Sector Supervisory Commission (CSSF), the Institute for Training in Banking, Luxembourg (IFBL), the Luxembourg Bankers' Association (ABBL - replaced in 2002 by the Federation of the Professionals of the Financial Sector - PROFIL) and the University of Luxembourg....''

ATTGIS
American Telephone and Telegraph Global Information Solutions. The former NCR, after it was bought out, and before it was spun off.

at the weekend
British for `over the weekend' or `on the weekend.' The two translations given here have slightly different but overlapping ranges of meaning. Without venturing to specify these precisely, it seems that in Canada the semantic ranges are not the same as in the US: googling with restrictions to .ca and .us TLD's indicates that the on form (not the on reading!) is relatively more popular in the former. Gorrr, these people are making the language incomprehensible!

At this time portable electronic devices may now be used.
Around the time also heralded by ``At this time you are now free to move about the cabin, but we ask that otherwise you remain seated with your seat-belt fastened for your safety.'' Not long after the ``last and final boarding call'' for your flight.

attire, proper
I feel certain that somewhere in this glossary there is a muddled, poorly-remembered reference to the material quoted below, but as I have only a muddled, poor recollection of where that entry is, I'll deposit the quotation here. It's taken from page 19 in my Pocket Books copy (chapter 3, at any event) of John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley. (Marquand's Apleys are fictional; the book is a satire so gentle that you have to read pagefuls just to get a laugh.)

  Shortly before he [Thomas Apley, the writer's (George's) father] purchased in Beacon Street he had been drawn, like so many others, to build one of those fine bow-front houses around one of these shady squares in the South End. When he did so nearly everyone was under the impression that this district would be one of the most solid residential sections of Boston instead of becoming, as it is to-day, a region of rooming houses and worse. You may have seen those houses in the South End, fine mansions with dark walnut doors and beautiful woodwork. One morning, as Tim, the coachman, came up with the carriage, to carry your Aunt Amelia and me to Miss Hendrick's Primary School, my father, who had not gone down to his office at the usual early hour because he had a bad head cold, came out with us to the front steps. I could not have been more than seven at the time, but I remember the exclamation that he gave when he observed the brownstone steps of the house across the street.
  ``Thunderation,'' Father said, ``there is a man in his shirt sleeves on those steps.'' The next day he sold his house for what he paid for it and we moved to Beacon Street. Father had sensed the approach of change; a man in his shirt sleeves had told him that the days of the South End were numbered.

For more Marquand material, see the BF entry. For yet more material -- the whole nine yards, as it were -- try Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle.

(No, no one really knows the origin of the expression ``the whole nine yards.'' I'm sure there's a Nobel prize in it for the fellow who cracks that nut.)

ATTIS
American Telephone & Telegraph Information Systems. I've seen both this and ATTGIS used.

ATTN, Attn.
ATTentioN.

attributive noun
A noun functioning as a modifier--usually as an adjective.

An attributive noun may itself be a compound noun or noun phrase. In that case, the attributive noun is traditionally hyphenated. Thus, the noun phrase ``intermediate frequency,'' consisting of the adjective intermediate modifying the noun frequency, becomes the attributive noun ``intermediate-frequency'' and can modify the noun amplifier in the noun phrase ``intermediate-frequency amplifier.'' The hyphen allows a reader encountering the words intermediate and frequency in sequence to parse them immediately as a modifier. If a compound attributive noun is written without a hyphen, then a reader is likely to misinterpret it initially as a subject or predicate, and is forced to reread or rethink the text when the noun functioning as noun is finally encountered.

Of particular interest in the present reference is the fact that the better literature, back in the day, preserved the hyphen in abbreviations. Hence, an intermediate-frequency amplifier was abbreviated I.-F. amp., whereas the center frequency of the signals such a device was designed to amplify was simply I.F. Sigh. For old times' sake, we've indicated the various historical abbreviated forms for the electronics abbreviations DC, AC, and IF. In part, this preservation of hyphenation in abbreviated forms was intended to help the reader recognize the abbreviation. It was an innocent time. A similar motivation led to the disappearance of periods in British abbreviations, as discussed in the Mr entry. We now continue with the discussion of attributive-noun hyphenation in unabbreviated cases.

The hyphenation rule is applied loosely. Some noun phrases, particularly proper nouns (e.g., Dow Jones) or disciplinary titles (e.g., Fluid Mechanics) are likely to be recognized as attributive in context and are not hyphenated. Sometimes the attributive noun phrase itself consists of an attributive compound noun modifying another noun (so in formal rather than functional terms, one may have an adjective followed by three nouns). In these cases there is no generally accepted rule; one hyphenates in whatever way seems likely to make the meaning clear most immediately.

In the case of attributive noun phrases that include a quantifier, American usage follows an interesting rule: when the noun phrase is transformed into a modifier, the noun component of the original phrase is put into singular form. For example, the noun phrase ``two cars'' becomes the adjective ``two-car,'' as in ``two-car garage.'' British usage does not follow this rule (hence ``two cars garage'', with the stress on the first syllable of garage and the comma after the quote for good measure). I'm not sure what the traditional rule has been, but now the plural-singular transformation seems to apply sometimes in Britain. It might just be American media influence. Canadian usage appears to coincide with US. Another example: ``nine days' wonder'' (British) vs. ``nine-day wonder'' (N. American). Of course, there are exceptions. See if you can find the one in the car alarm entry!

Another difference between British and North American dialects' use of plural (but not directly concerning attributive nouns) has to do with the grammatical number of collective nouns. In North American English, collective nouns are generally grammatically singular unless the noun form is plural (``Congress meets,'' ``the Miami Heat is out of the play-offs,'' but ``the Yankees win''). In British, collective nouns are usually grammatically plural even when the noun form is singular (``Manchester United win'').

Attributive nouns get a mention in the Latin lesson at the A.M. entry.

Atü, atü
German, Atmosphärenüberdruck. English, `above atmospheric pressure.'

ATV
Advanced-Technology Vehicle.

ATV
Advanced TeleVision. FCC term encompassing everything from digital HDTV to enhancements of the current analog standard. Here's their latest document on the matter, as of early 1998. The IEEE Approved Indexing Keyword List instructs that HDTV be used in place of ATV. I like this idea better than the FCC's, because frankly, ``advanced television'' is an oxymoron.

ATV
All-Terrain Vehicle.

ATV
ATazanaVir. A protease inhibitor used in the treatment of AIDS.

ATVA
All-Terrain Vehicle Association. Sister organization: AMA.

ATW
American Theatre Wing. Their logo displays a mask with two of them (wings, that is; the feathered sort, not the architectural). ATW is ``devoted to promoting excellence in the American theatre.'' I infer that this is done by staging expensive productions of musicals in New York City. ATW bestows Tony Awards.

``Wing'' sounds kind of martial. Or maybe wings are intended to suggest angels' wings and death. Vide ATBM.

ATWT
``As the World Turns.'' A CBS daytime soap opera.

AU
German, Abgasuntersuchung. `Gas emission investigation.' Cf. ASU.

AU
Acousti[co]-Ultrasonic.

au
French with the same meaning but not the same usage as à le. The French expression à le is used primarily to explain what au means. I suppose au can be regarded as a contraction of à le.

A contraction of à   la is à la.

AU
Americans United for separation of church and state.

AU, a.u.
Astronomical Unit. The average earth-sun distance. Obviously this is not a very precise definition: even the two most obvious averages -- time average and angular average -- are unequal by Kepler's 2-3 law. No matter, the eccentricity of earth's orbit is small (~1%). In the most interesting units, 1 AU = 8.3 light minutes. In units that would be more meaningful to those planning to drive, it's about 149.6 million kilometers (that's 92 or 93 million miles, give or take a gas station). Even though we could do so, we do not give a more precise value at this entry. After all, el que quiere celeste, que le cueste. Also, we get more hits this way. See the IAU entry.

AU
Auburn University (in Auburn, Alabama).

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Au.
Latin, Aulus. A praenomen, typically abbreviated when writing the full tria nomina.

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Au
Chemical symbol for gold, from the Latin aurum. For a bit on gold in semiconductor electronics, see the Gold entry. For a bit on the geology of gold mines, see the pluton entry. For a movie connection see AU1.

For more general information visit the gold entry in WebElements and the entry at Chemicool, where it was #2 on the Top Five List a long time ago when I checked.

.au
AUdio. Filename extension for a Sun Unix sound file format.

.au
Australia (ISO code used in TCP/IP addresses). Country code 61 for telephone. Currently, the country consists of six states, some territories with various degrees of self-government (the Northern Territory, the Australian Capital Territory, and Norfolk Island) and various federally administered external territories.

AUA
Association des Universités Africaines / Association of African Universities.

AUA
Association of University Architects.

AUB
African Union Broadcasters.

AUB
American University of Beirut.

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a.u.c., A.U.C., AUC
Ab Urbe Condita. Latin: `from the founding of the city [of Rome]' (around 753 BCE). Roman date designation.

AUC
Area Under Curve. True, it's a count-on-your-fingers way to say `integrated,' but medical researchers apparently use this expression `professionally.' Maybe they're trying to drum up new business; the acronym certainly makes me sick. In the medical context, AUC is frequently the time integral of a solute concentration in blood or plasma.

AUC
Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia. Spanish, `united self-defense [forces] of Colombia.' Nominally a union of at-least-originally independent militias fighting against the left-wing armies of Colombia (ELN and FARC), and the name acronym is construed plural in Spanish, but nevertheless it does appear to be under a single command. I seem to recall it was begun by Jesús A. Castaño, who was killed in 1980, and continues under the leadership of his sons.

It is certainly in organizations of people that grammatical-number distinctions begin to blur. This is even more the case for the military and civilian ``wings,'' or what have you, or organizations regarded as terrorist.

This is interesting: they seem to have a website.

AUCAM
Association Universitaire Catholique d'Aide aux Missions. A publisher in Louvain.

AUCC, A.U.C.C., l'AUCC
Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. Despite the enormous difference between the vocabularies of English and French, this organization somehow managed to contrive a French name that would correspond to the same initialism (it's usually impossible): Association des universités et collèges du Canada.

AUCCO
Academy of Upper Cervical Chiropractic Organizations. It appears that

au courant
French: `up to date.'

Stupid: `with berries.'

Sometimes I feel like a wrote a beautiful reference work and some jerk-off came along and scrawled graffiti all over it, and it turned out that I was the jerk-off. I also have an entry for au.

Au.D.
Doctor of AUdiology. According to itself, this ADA is the ``Home of the Au.D.''

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Audi
The Audi car company (fnd'd. 1909) got its name from the imperative singular of audio (Latin for `I hear') because the founder, a German named August Horch, had sold the rights to his name along with his first car company (fnd'd. 1899). The use of a Latin calque was the man's son's suggestion. Perhaps it's a slight approximation or exaggeration to call it a calque. Oh, alright, it's not a calque -- audi is the Latin translation of German horch. [The German verbs hören (`to hear') and horchen (`to listen') are cognate with the English words hear and hearken. Needless to say, all are cognate with das Ohr, `ear.'] The semantic distance between horchen and hören is perhaps not so great as between listen and hear.]

Im Jahre 1932, Audi and Horch combined, along with Wanderer and DKW (Das kleine Wunder), into Auto-Union, adopting a logo in the form of four interlocking rings that is still the trademark of Audi. [Kleine Wunder can be literally translated `small wonder,' but the German expression only has the sense of `small miracle,' and does not suggest `no surprise [that]' like the English expression. Little wonder the company folded and was merged away.]

More details on Audi company history here.

I cribbed this from a posting on the Classics list, naturally. Here it is in the archives.

Incidentally, Audi is itself not, um, unheard of as a surname. Robert Audi (b. 1941), for instance, is the author of many philosophical works, such as Action, Intention, and Reason (Cornell University Press, 1993), and general editor of The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (CUP, 1/e 1995, 2/e 1999).

a.u.e, a.u.E, AUE, aue
Alt.Usage.English, a newsgroup.

AuEST
AUstralian Eastern Standard Time.

Auge
German noun (fem.) meaning `eye.'

auge
Spanish noun (masc.) meaning `culmination' or, in a figurative sense, `apogee.'

I'd like to mention that symbol on the greenback, the eye above the pyramid, and I would, if I could see any excuse to do it.

Auger process
Two-stage photo-ionization process, in which the energy of a photon is initially absorbed by a deeply-bound state. This electron has not absorbed enough energy to escape (to be ionized). When the hole it leaves behind is filled, however, the energy is transferred to an electron in a higher-lying state, which does become ionized. [Pronounced ``Oh-zhay.'']

AUI
Associated Universities, Inc. ``... a not-for-profit corporation based in Washington, DC. It was founded in 1946 by nine northeastern universities to manage major scientific facilities. AUI currently operates the National Radio Astronomy Observatory under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation [NSF].''

AUI
Attachment Unit Interface. A type of connector.

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Aul.
Latin, Aulus. A praenomen, typically abbreviated when writing the full tria nomina.

aum
Standard (Hepburn) transliteration of Japanese version of the Indian holy syllable om. Part of the name of the Japanese poison-gas cult Aum Shinrikyo mentioned at the LPF entry. Shinrikyo means something like `supreme truth.'

AUMF
Authorization for Use of Military Force. Name of an act of the US Congress passed on September 14, 2001.

AUMIS
African Union Mission in Sudan. Officially AMIS, q.v.

AUP
Acceptable Use Policy.

AUPHA
Association of University Programs in Health Administration. It describes itself as ``a not-for-profit association of university-based educational programs, faculty, practitioners, and provider organizations. Its members are dedicated to continuously improving the field of healthcare management and practice. It is the only non-profit entity of its kind that works to improve the delivery of health services throughout the world - and thus the health of citizens - by educating professional managers at the entry level.''

au pis
French expression literally meaning something like `at worst' (see au and pis aller). The English expression ``at worst'' often has a meliorating connotation, as if to suggest that the worst possible may not be so bad. The flatter connotation of au pis is apparently better captured by `if worse comes to worst.' I suggest the mnemonic ``oh piss!'' (Better yet ``aw pee!'')

Incidentally, pis also means `udder,' so ``veau au pis'' does not have to mean `calf at worst.' Unfortunately, ``pis pis'' just means `worse udder.' I was kinda hoping there could be an udder-worst-type pun.

AUR
Association of University Radiologists. Affiliated societies on the web: APDR and A3CR2.

Aur
Auriga. Official IAU abbreviation for the constellation.

AURA
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.

AURP
AppleTalk Update-based Routing Protocol.

AUS
Autonomous Undersea System[s]. (US Navy acronym.)

AusCERT
AUStralian Computer Emergency Response Team. ``Emergencies'' are security breaches. See CERT for other relevant organizations.

ausgeruhter Kopf
`Well-rested head' in German. The education director of a Texas academy emailed today to praise our WAC entry. It reminds me of the classic movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, from 1982. It was a perfect movie. For example, its main page at IMDb says that the ``plot synopsis is empty.'' See what I mean? Perfect! Anyway, one of the characters is Brad Hamilton (played by Judge Reinhold) who likes to describe himself as ``a single, successful guy,'' at least until he loses his job and his girlfriend. It just goes to demonstrate the fragility of life.

But I wasn't reminded of this immediately. I just mentioned the email to mom, and read her the WACky entry. She didn't think it was so inspired. I must have read it too fast. Yeah, that's it. Then I mentioned that yesterday I had an email from a guy who wrote ``And Stammtisch Beau Fleuve means what? Table reserved by a beautiful river?'' That made her laugh, even though it's a fair interpretation. After she stopped laughing, she commented that what her grandmother would have said about the glossary was (is?) that it's the product of an ausgeruhter Kopf. Googling on this phrase and related ones (vom ausgeruhten Kopf, etc.) suggests that this is no longer, if it ever was, a common expression. Anyway, since you asked what I wrote (you did, didn't you?), here it is:

``Beau fleuve'' is believed to have been used in reference to the Niagara River, and to be the source, in corrupt form, of the name of the city of Buffalo. I started the glossary when I was an asst. prof at the University of Buffalo, and there was a bunch of friends I ate lunch with regularly. At the time (1995), the fellow in charge of Engineering Computing was stupidly reluctant to let me set up a web site for a small glossary of microelectronics terms (and some other words and abbreviations I used in class). To bypass him, I got a website from a different university webserver for the stated purpose of having a web presence for a university group (my lunch group). To get the relevant university official to grant my request, I tried to make it sound a bit more serious or at least established [than it actually was], so I gave our informal group a name.

AUSJAL
Asociación de Universidades confiadas a la Compañía de Jesús en América Latina. (Spanish: `Association of Universities entrusted to the Society of Jesus [SJ] in Latin America.') Corresponding US organization is AJCU.

Austehc
AUstralian Science and TEchnology Heritage Centre. Launched in December 1999, it was the immediate successor to ASAP.

AUSTEL
AUStralian TELecommunication Authority.

Austenian
See Janeite.

Australia Day
Previously known as Anniversary Day and Foundation Day, Australia Day commemorates the beginning of settlement in Australia, when Governor Arthur Phillip landed at Sydney Cove on January 26, 1788. Interestingly, this is a holiday that was once celebrated as a Monday holiday to make a three-day weekend, but which now is celebrated on the actual day. In the years before the 1988 bicentennial, it was celebrated on the first Monday following January 26, but in 1988 it was celebrated on the anniversary (a Tuesday that year) and has been ever since.

For someone whose national holiday celebrates independence and freedom, the particulars of the event commemorated on Australia Day can induce queasiness. Governor Phillip came to found a penal colony. The ships he came with carried, in addition to 450 sailors and government personnel, over 750 prisoners (including 15 children).

Australia celebrates its other national holiday in common with New Zealand: Anzac Day, described at the ANZAC entry. Australia has other public holidays, but they're not especially national: Good Friday and Easter Monday (I guess that's a three-day weekend plus a day to dry out), Christmas and Boxing Day, and New Year's Day. There are three officially observed days that are not public holidays: Commonwealth Day (second Monday in March), Mother's Day (second Sunday in May), and Father's Day (first Sunday in September). Various other holidays are widely celebrated unofficially or are official at the state level, but are not declared public holidays at the national level (so I understand). These include the Monarch's birthday and Labour Day.

Labour Day in Australia is celebrated on different days in different states. The day generally commemorates the establishment of the eight-hour day, and this was won separately by various trade unions at different times in different states. The eight-hour day was an early focus of the union movement (see 888) in the nineteenth century.

Austrian scientific suicides
It seems like a category large enough, or at least disproportionate enough, to merit its own entry:
  1. September 5: Ludwig Boltzmann
  2. September 23: Paul Kammerer
  3. September 25: Paul Ehrenfest

AUT
UK Association of University Teachers. According to a webpage viewed in April 2005, it was ``the trade union and professional association for over 48,700 UK higher education professionals'' (this included not just instructional personnel but also librarians and some others). In addition to a newsletter, they had a magazine cleverly named ``AUTlook.'' Alas, this bit of cleverness will have to be abandoned. In 2006, AUT merged with NATFHE to form a new union is called the University and College Union (UCU).

Autana
One of those ``little magazines.'' This one is published in Puerto Rico and is dedicated to bad poetry in Spanish (subtitle: Revista Internacional de Poesía). Perfect-bound, glossy cover. The cool thing about it is the way they assign dates to the issues. Vol. 1, Núm. 8 is dated ``Noviembre 2002 a febrero 2003.'' Isn't that great?

Rhyme schemes? We don' need no steenkeen rhyme schemes!

Authorized
Checking authorization. This is a special terminology used by DSL dialers. For example, say you launch the dialer and it reports
Authorized.
Dialer Error629.  Connection closed by remote computer.
Technical support will conclude that you're successfully connecting but that there are other problems. Check the cabling. Power down and power up. Turn off all other appliances. Jog around the block. Hmm. Apparently your operating system is too old. You should spend a few hundred dollars on an OS upgrade and more memory. Look, why not just buy a new computer? Etc.

Thank him politely and call back later. Talk to someone who understands the arcane terminology. ``Authorized''? Let's try another userid and password. Ah-hah -- works! The problem appears to be: your password was munged!

Bingo.

By the way, the equivalent terminology from the ``Online Control Pad'' dialog box is

Internet Connection Not Established

Network connection is not available.
Do you want to work offline?
This typically means `password mistyped.'

auto
AUTOmobile. In Scandinavian countries, bil is common.

autobiography
Humphrey Carpenter has speculated that
Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

Maybe it's the only form.

According to the back-cover copy of her An Accidental Autobiography, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison was asked to describe the book she was writing and responded, ``an autobiography in which I am not the main character.'' This doesn't strike me as particularly novel.

autocephalous
A term from Greek roots meaning `self-headed.' It sounds like it ought to have something to do with soccer. I don't remember our ninth-grade gym teacher, Mr. Carey, using that term when he introduced us to the exotic sport of ``sock-a-bowel'' and pint-size Armando introduced us to the experience of being consistently and reliably out-dribbled, but somehow I'm not surprised. Anyway, it turns out to be a term meaning `self-governed,' used to describe different Orthodox (i.e., Eastern rite) churches.

AUTODIN
AUTOmatic DIgital Network. Part of DMS.

autoinfection
Transfer of infection from one part of the body to another part of the same body. The standard otoscope or whatever it's called has a disposable paper cover for the cone that fits in the outer ear. After looking in my infected ear (outer-ear infection; I guess that qualifies as a sports injury if you catch it in an Olympic pool), my doctor went around to check the uninfected ear. ``Shouldn't you change that?'' ``No, the infection won't transfer.''

Supposing for the sake of argument that he's wrong, I wonder: is infection transferred from one part of the body to another part of the same body by the good offices of a physician properly ``autoinfection,'' ``iatrogenic infection,'' or what? And is the physician a ``vector'' or the 'scope a ``vehicle''? (An auto? BTW, the word transfection refers to something else entirely.)

The last time I had a check-up, I asked him (same doctor) why he was examining my ears. What was he actually looking for? He said he was looking for my brain; if it wasn't there he'd be able to see straight across. If I'd had a brain I would have pointed out that in that case, there was no need to check on both sides.

The Divinyls had a hit with ``I Touch Myself.'' The middle line of the chorus is ``When I think about you I touch myself.'' Sort of like doing push-ups, I suppose.

You know, the three main forms of plague -- bubonic, pneumonic, and septic, in increasing order of how soon an obituary may be needed -- all result from infection by the same bacterium (Yersinia pestis). They differ essentially in where they are or start out, and one kind can turn into another. Similarly, pulmonary tuberculosis (the usual TB), scrofula, and a host of other unpleasant diseases can all arise from the same bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Some of these diseases, however, can be caused by other similar bacteria. Scrofula in children is usually caused by Mycobacterium scrofulaceum or Mycobacterium avium.

autoionization
Spontaneous ionization of a motor vehicle occurring in equilibrium, or the same process occuring with something other than an auto. The reaction
H2O --> H+ + OH-

is a common example of autoionization.

automatic camp-on
You stay on a line that rings busy, and when your called party hangs up, your call rings through. I could use this to call some people.

autovalente
A Spanish word meaning `able to care for oneself.' Effectively an antonym of the English word invalid.

AUTOVON
AUTOmatic VOice Network.

This US military network was activated in December 1963, and became the principal long-haul, nonsecure voice communications network within the Defense Communications System. It eventually became a part of the Defense Switched Network (DSN), the replacement system activated in 1990 to provide long-distance telephone service to the military.

You can get more information about this system from the `touch tone dials'' page at telephonetribute.com and by following links from the AFCA home page.

When I worked at military labs in the 1980's, my desk phone was always part of AUTOVON. I could call out of the network (and most of my calls off base were off network as well). When calling people at other government labs, I had a choice: I could call their regular number (seven-digit number, preceded by an area code if different from mine) or I could call them within AUTOVON, in which case I always dialed a seven-digit number. The last four digits of the AUTOVON number were the same as the ordinary phone number, and the first three digits essentially identified the military site. There was a slight preference for calling within AUTOVON when possible, simply for budget reasons. Otherwise, for low- or non-ranking people like me, AUTOVON was not noticeably different from the regular civilian phone network.

AUTOVON, derived from the Army's Switched Circuit Automatic Network, was in fact designed to provide the Department of Defense with an internal telephone capability functionally equivalent to toll and Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) calls. However, it was also designed to provide precedence preemption for high-priority (much-higher-priority-than-me) users. This was implemented with a fourth column of keys, the fourth (1633-Hz) column at the DTMF entry. The column, labeled A/B/C/D from top row to bottom row there, had keys labeled FO/F/I/P, for Flash Override, Flash, Immediate, and Priority. (Also, the octothorpe key was labeled A.) Higher keys had higher precedence, and pressing one had the effect of pre-empting any lower-precedence call that was in the way. (The precedence below ``priority'' was ``routine.'') Phones with higher-precedence keys that were functional were available only to higher ranks in the military chain of command. With a few exceptions (POTUS, Sec'y of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff) those with access to them were only authorized to press those keys for specific levels of emergency. Here's some more detail.

AUU
ATM User-to-User.

AUV
Autonomous Under{sea|water} Vehicle. A self-propelled submarine robot, intended to function with minimal control input. AUV's are still mostly experimental. Cf. ROV.

aux
French phrase meaning à les (in French).

This glossary entry is on the very cusp of futility: only a vanishingly small fraction of French-nonspeakers have the requisite level of ignorance to benefit from it, and those few wouldn't know to look here. Perfect!

Of course we're not going to give the English.

AUX, A/UX
Apple UniX.

Aux
AUXiliary.

AU1
The license plate number of the Rolls Royce Phantom 337 belonging to Auric Goldfinger, in the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger. Goldfinger was played by Gert Fröbe (credited as Gert Frobe). Goldfinger is the chief villain in this one, of course.

Do I really have to explain this? Gold cation of valence 1 (Au1+) is aurous. Auric is valence 3 (Au3+)! Honestly, sometimes I think you people don't even care.

Also in that movie, Honor Blackman plays the role of Pussy Galore. Somehow I think that when her parents were considering names, the future they imagined for her was nothing like being a Bond woman. (Particularly as she was born in 1927, and Ian Fleming didn't invent James Bond until after he retired with the rank of Commander from WWII service in British Naval Intelligence.)

AV
Air-to-Vapor (mass ratio). Mechanical engineers seem to prefer to call this a ``weight ratio.'' Cf. AF.

AV
Alleged Vegetarian.

[column]

AV
Appendix Virgiliana.

AV, A-V
AtrioVentricular.

AV, A/V
Audio-Visual.

AV
Authorized Version (of the Bible in English). For a very long time that was the KJV. There's an old saying that a translation is a commentary. There's a Bible commentary called The Unauthorized Version, by Robin Lane Fox.

AVA
Academy of Video Arts & Sciences.

AVA
Australian Veterinary Association. It ``is the professional organisation representing veterinarians across Australia.''

avail
  1. A verb meaning `be of use.' It means just that as an intransitive verb. The construction ``avail oneself of'' means for one `to take advantage of.' (Similarly with myself, yourself, etc.)
  2. A noun that is apparently short for `speaker availability.' (Availability, of course, is a noun constructed on the adjective available, from the verb avail. It's crazy, but I love this stuff.)

Chris Suellentrop did a series of ``Dispatches from Campaign 2004'' for Slate. His September 8 dispatch included this: ``It's been more than five weeks since Kerry last took questions at a press conference, or an `avail,' as it's called.''

Avance Logic, Inc.
Makes video and audio chips. Homepage has petulant blinking.

I'm not sure in what year I wrote the preceding part of this entry. I checked back in late 2004: no more blink; no more Avance, either.

AVAR
Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights.

AVC
American Voter Coalition.

AVC
Association of Visual Communicators. Look at me when I talk to you!

AVC
Atomic Vapor Cell.

AVC
Automatic Volume Control.

Isn't it fun to speak progressively more softly, so people lean toward you, and listen real hard, and then suddenly to shout at the top of your lungs so their ears hurt? No? Killjoy.

AVCPT
(UK) Association for Veterinary Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

AVCS
Audio-Visual Copyright Society, Ltd. ``Based in Australia, serving the world.''

AVDP, avdp.
Avoirdupois.

[column]

AVE
Alta Velocidad Española. `Spanish [.es] High Speed [train].' A 300 kph TGV derivative operated by RENFE. Cf. ave.

Ave.
AVEnue.

ave.
AVErage. Try to use this only if you can avoid capitalizing the a, so it isn't mistaken for an abbreviation of some oddly named avenue. In fact, avoid it altogether and use avg.

ave
Spanish, `Bird.' See also AVE.

[Football icon]

Ave Maria
Latin, `Hail Mary.' Name and first words of a common Roman-Catholic prayer. A desperation football pass.

AVENG
English for AViation. Cf. ESP, EAV.

Avest
Avestan. Makes you wonder why they bother to define an abbreviation.

AVG
American Volunteer Group. Better known as the Flying Tigers. This was a group of personnel (pilots and ground crew) released from active duty in the air forces of the US Army and Navy, serving as volunteers on the Chinese side in the Sino-Japanese war. The group was formed by Colonel Claire Chennault. Chennault had retired from the USAAC as a captain in the 1930's and was appointed to command the largely nonexistent Chinese air forces by Chiang Kai-Shek, leader of the Nationalist Chinese government.

The AVG flew Curtiss P-40B fighters purchased by the Chinese government under a special arrangement with Curtiss-Wright. (The British had taken over a French order for P-40B's after the fall of France, and Curtiss had six assembly lines working on the order. Under an arrangement proposed by Curtiss Vice-President Burdette Wright (an old friend of Chennault), the British waived priority on 100 P-40B's rolling off one of those lines, allowing them to be sold to China. In return, Curtiss added a seventh line and delivered later-model P-40's to Britain that were more suitable for combat.) The P-40's used by the AVG were less maneuverable than Japanese Zeros, and they had crude gunsights, but the Tigers developed tactics that allowed them to achieve impressive kill ratios. After the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the US into WWII as an active combatant, the Flying Tigers' success was one of the few bright spots in a Pacific war that was starting out badly for the US. (In this connection also, recall James H. Doolittle.)

Chennault's status was rather irregular and his command a bit informal. According to a history page at the self-described official site, he was originally invited to China in 1937 by Madame Chiang, on a three-month mission to make a confidential survey of the Chinese Air Force, and his official status until the US entered the war was always a subject of speculation. ``Chennault himself states [probably in his Way of a Fighter] that he was a civilian advisor to the Secretary of the Commission for Aeronautical Affairs, first Madame Chiang and later T.V. Soong. ... Even while he commanded the American Volunteer Group in combat, his official job was adviser to the Central Bank of China, and his passport listed his occupation as a farmer.''

In July 1942, the AVG was incorporated into the USAAF, and Chennault was promoted to brigadier general. Chennault had great publicity, close connections with FDR and the White House, and a good relationship with Gen. Chiang Kai-Shek. In October 1942, he wrote FDR that with just 105 more fighters, and 30 medium and 12 heavy bombers, he could win the war by gaining air superiority and destroying Japanese shipping and industrial production. It's not clear how much of this wooly optimism FDR bought into, but Chiang's ground forces (could they even be called an army?) weren't engaging the enemy, so this approach had its attractions. In late spring 1943, Chennault was given command of the US Army's newly formed Fourteenth Air Force, and priority on supplies airlifted from India. The 14th underperformed. Chennault was eased out of command after FDR died.

When the war ended in 1945, ten AVG pilots formed an air cargo company called Flying Tiger Line, originally flying Conestoga freighters purchased as war surplus from the United States Navy. It achieved a number of firsts, and after acquiring its rival cargo airline Seaboard World Airlines on October 1, 1980, it surpassed Pan Am as the world's largest air cargo carrier. As it happens, my uncle Robert flew for them in the late 1970's or early 1980's. In 1989, the company was purchased by FedEx.

avg.
AVeraGe. Plural avgs. Singular also abbreviated ave. (deprecated).

AVGAS
AViation GASoline.

AVGS
Advanced Video Guidance Sensor. NASA designation of a device developed for DART that gathers navigation data by capturing reflections from laser beams directed at an object at close range (within 500 meters), using them to compute relative bearing, range, and attitude. (Though not all at the maximum range. Range and attitude -- relative orientation of target craft -- were expected to be available only within 200 meters. I'm not sure they know if that's so yet.)

AVGS
Ambulatory Visit GroupS.

AVH
Academy of Veterinary Homeopathy. The content of what ought to be the homepage has me a bit disoriented, but anyway I'm glad that even ducks can have a dose of quackery.

AVHRR
Advanced Very-High-Resolution Radiometer.

AVI
Association for Veterinary Informatics.

AVI
Audio Video Interleaved.

AVID
Advancement Via Individual Determination.

AVID
Antelope Valley Internet Dialers. ``The Internet User Group for the Antelope Valley.'' Judging from the map on their home page, it appears that Antelope Valley is located on earth, and probably not in Antarctica.

Oh, here's something: meetings are held in Lancaster, CA. Also, there are no meetings until further notice.

AVIS
Audio-Visual Information Systems.

avis
Latin, `bird.' Well known, of course, from the expression rara avis, `rare [i.e., strange] bird.'

The Latin word avis became ave in Spanish, so the Latin prayer Ave Maria would sound like `Mary bird' in Spanish, to anyone who didn't know that it doesn't mean that.

aviso
Spanish noun meaning `advertisement' and verb meaning `I notify, alert.'

avisorar
Spanish, `visualize, envision.' I think this may be primarily a Latin American usage. If the English verb eviscerate had a close cognate in Spanish, it would be eviscerar, which in Latin America would sound close to avisorar, except for the initial vowel.

AVLIC
Association of Visual Language Interpreters of Canada. This appears to be one of those unrequitedly bilingual organizations. (Here ``bilingual'' and ``one of those'' are both meant in the Canadian sense or context. Then again, maybe not.) The old AVLIC logo featured a Canadian maple leaf (well, maybe a stylized sugar maple leaf; I'm no naturalist) and the text ``AVLIC/AILVC.'' The new logo has a more naturalistic maple leaf dotting the letter i of a lower-case ``avlic.'' Also, the English name of the organization is spelled out along the bottom, either alone or above the French version.

To be fair for a change, I should probably note that there's a good reason why AVLIC/AILVC seems not to be well-represented in French-speaking parts of Canada, and why there is no provincial AILVC chapter for Quebec. According to the AVLIC Mission Statement, AVLIC is ``a national professional association which represents interpreters whose working languages are English and American Sign Language (ASL).'' (That is, they interpret between ASL and English.)

AVLIS
Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation.

AVM
ArterioVenous Malformation. Here's a support page.

AVM
Audio Video and Multimedia.

AVM
Automated Valuation Model. Used by expert systems to generate assessments -- in real estate, at least.

AVM
Automatic Vehicle Monitoring. Normally refers to remote monitoring of road vehicle location.

AVMA
American Veterinary Medical Association. The main publications of the AVMA are the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA) and the American Journal of Veterinary Research (AJVR).

AVMA
Arkansas Veterinary Medical Association. Cf. the national AVMA.

AVMF
American Veterinary Medical Foundation.

AVMMS
Audio Video and Multimedia Services.

AVN
Australian Vaccination Network.

AVN
AViatioN.

avo
A currency subunit used in Macao. The basic currency unit is the pataca, equal to 100 avos. Macao is a former Portuguese colony, and avo is a much-shortened form of Portuguese oitavo, `eighth.' I think this is cute because the original word has been not merely shortened, but shortened almost to its semantically least significant component -- essentially an inflection. It's like shortening eighth to th.

Similar radical shortenings (radical eliminations, literally) in European languages include auto, bil, and uncle. More generally, Japanese has a lot of much-shortened loans from European languages, particularly English. For some examples, see the perm entry.

AVP
Arginine VasoPressin. Plays a rôle, along with the renin-angiotensin system and natriuretic hormones, in water homeostasis. Why can't they make a beer that doesn't take you to the bathroom? Is the current scheme a safety feature?

AVP
Assistant Vice President.

AVPS
Association Variose pour la Promotion de la Sidénologie. The same organization serves a more Englishy site where they explain AVPS as the ``Fundation for AIDS Research & Care.'' (``Thi site is first intended to professionals,'' dontcha know.)

AVR
Aortic Valve Replacement.

AVS
{ Adult | Age } Verification Service. You say you're over eighteen, eh? Then you must have a what -- VISA, MasterCard, American Express? What's the number? Expiration date? Hmmm... Looks like you're good! Justreadtheagreementand SIGN HERE FOR YOUR ``FREE PASS'' TO OVER 200,000 HARD-CORE SITES!

AVS
American Vacuum Society.

Really, nature does not abhor a vacuum -- it's the pressure outside that pushes stuff in.

The first time I wore my ``Nature abhors a vacuum tube'' tee shirt to work (in 1994 or thereabouts), a student objected!

AVS
Anti-Virus Software. I should probably warn you that the editor of this glossary had a cold in March, and in April the compiler came down with probably the same rhinovirus. The two are in frequent email contact, and these emails affect what you read on your computer! You shouldn't be too worried, but if I were you I'd wipe the screen and the keyboard, just in case. Heck, wipe the file system -- you can never be too careful. Use some Listerine on the speakers, too, and any other oral cavities on your PC.

AVS
Application Visualization System.

AVSL
Association of Vision Science Librarians. It's ``an international organization composed of professional librarians, or persons acting in that capacity, whose collections and services include the literature of vision.''

AVT
Amphibious Vehicle, Tracked.

AVT
AudioVisual Terminal.

AVT
Automated Voice Technology.

Avus
AutomobilVerkehrs- und -Übungsstraße. (I.e., AutomobilVerkehrsstraße und AutomobilÜbungsstraße.) German `Automobile-Traffic Streets and Test Tracks.' Formerly Rennstrecke für Autorennen in Berlin (`Racetracks for Car races in Berlin') now a part of the Autobahn system). That's about how people drive on the Autobahn too.

AVWTC
Arbitrarily-Varying WireTap Channel.

.aw
(Domain code for) Aruba. The principal export is homeward-bound tourists. The official languages are Dutch and Papiamento. Papiamento written looks like Spanish with spelling slightly adjusted -- less different from Castilian (the Iberian language called ``Spanish'' in English) than Catalan is -- plus a number of Dutch words. Aruba is a Dutch possession.

On April 29, 2003, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands knighted Aruba native Sidney Ponson. At the time, he was a 43-54 career pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, with a 4.74 ERA. He had never had a winning season. In the subsequent three months, he caught fire, racking up a 12-5 record with a 3.45 ERA. He turned down a $21 million 3-year deal and at the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline he was dealt to the San Francisco Giants for for pitchers Kurt Ainsworth, Damian Moss and Ryan Hannaman. In San Francisco he was only 3-6, but had a 3.71 ERA. In the off-season, Baltimore lured him back for $22.5 million over three years.

You know, the sports analysts talk about his not giving up the long ball so much in 2003, and mental toughness and rotator-cuff injuries and controlling his weight -- what a crock! Pitching is a science, like astrology and psychology. He just got psyched by the knighthood. After ten games in 2004, he's 3-7 with an ERA of 6.47.

AW
Addison-Wesley or Addison-Wesley Longman, or Addison-Wesley Publishing Group. Can you say ``assignment agreement''? Sure you can!

A&W
A chain of root beer stands named after the founders -- Roy Allen and Fred Wright. It was the earliest restaurant franchise.

AW
``Another World'' An NBC daytime soap opera. Another homepage, with links to NBC's.

AW:
Occurs in email subject headers. Apparently stands for Antwort (German: `answer').

AW
Application Whatnot.

Okay, I confess, I made it up. A moment of weakness.

A/W
ArtWork. Typesetters' abbreviation.

AWA
American Whitewater Affiliation. ``[T]o conserve and restore America's whitewater resources and to enhance opportunities to enjoy them safely.''

See some relevant phonological thoughts at the AWWA entry.

AWA
American Women's Association. An American expats' mutual support group. Similar organizations go by various similar names (American Women of ..., American Women's Club of ..., American Women's Organization of ..., etc.). The umbrella organization is FAWCO. See also AWA Singapore, which serves a page of AWA links in various countries.

AWA
Animal Welfare Act, originally enacted in 1966. In amendments passed in 1970, the USDA is instructed to conduct an annual lab-animal census. They counted 1,213,814 in 1998. Such precision! What day was that?

Uncertainties concerning what constitutes an animal under that law were resolved by Secretary of Agriculture Clifford Hardin, who exercised his administrative authority to exclude rats, mice, and birds. These together make up anywhere from eighty to ninety-eight percent of warmblooded lab animals, depending on which interested party's estimate you believe. The AAVS filed suit against the USDA in 1999, maintaining that the original intent of the legislation was to include them. It's a good thing no one is proposing counting fruit flies or flatworms.

Here was the USDA's breakdown for 1998:
CategoryNumber
Oooh! Bunnywabbits287,523
Guinea pigs261,305
Hamsters206,243
Other Animals142,963
Pigs76,568
Dogs76,071
Primates57,377
Other farm animals53,671
Sheep27,381
Cats24,712

``Other animals'' includes ferrets, woodchucks, armadillos, chinchillas, horses, spotted hyenas, and opposums. The categories are given above in the order in which the USDA presents them. If you don't like that order, then you could try suing the USDA. A few groups that you would expect were unhappy with the decision to exclude the most common lab animals. They took the usual multi-track approach -- direct petition, indirect pressure, lawsuit. On October 6, 2000, a lawsuit brought against the USDA by the ARDF was dismissed by US District Court Judge Ellen S. Huvelle.

AWACS
Airborne Warning And Control System. An electronically very souped-up Boeing 707. [Pronounced ``AY-wax.'']

A.W.A.K.E., AWAKE
Alert, Well, And Keeping Energetic. The American Sleep Apnea Association (ASAA) organizes local support groups called A.W.A.K.E. groups in the fifty states and D.C., and in the seven Canadian provinces that have a land border with the lower 48 states. (Those seven turn out to be all the Canadian provinces that have a land border with any part of the territory of the US, because the Yukon Territory, oddly enough, is a territory and not a province.) Some of the groups have websites. This page leads to contact information for all groups in the A.W.A.K.E. Network.

Awake!
A nonglossy magazine published by the Jehovah's Witnesses, for its missionaries to hand to prospects. The Gideons leave a whole Bible on its back in your hotel room, but not even one missionary in that position.

awareness
``The week of March 14-20 2004 has been declared Severe Weather Awareness Week by the Governor of the State of Indiana and by the Commissioners of St. Joseph County.'' This isn't getting off to a very good start -- I didn't find out until the week was two days old. I guess I missed the first announcement on account of the wild festivities for Einstein's 125th birthday.

``As part of Awareness Week, the State Emergency Management Agency and the National Weather Service will be conducting two `Test Tornado Warnings' between 2:00PM-2:30PM and between 7:00PM-7:30PM, Wednesday, March 17, 2004.'' March 17th in St. Joseph County, home of the Fighting Irish. If you think the Einstein shindig was big...

``Should actual severe weather be a threat on March 17, the testing will be held on March 18.'' It's reminiscent of the day of the Doolittle raid in Tokyo.

You know, this whole awareness thing was so memorable that the next year when I ran across the forgotten old email announcing it, I created an entirely new entry for it (contrast). I may be stuck in a rut, but I have deleted the announcement.

awareness days
Small parts (typically one seventh or one eighth) of an awareness week, usually found in isolation, embedded in weeks, months, even lives of obtuseness. Look, I don't really want to define this. I just wanted to pass along a blurb for Every Day Is a Holiday by George Mahood:
Perfect for fans of A.J. Jacobs: Bored with his routine, George Mahood decided to change his life by celebrating every holiday on the calendar -- from Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day to Inane Answering Machine Message Day. Join him on his strange, hilarious adventure!

(With National Curmudgeon Day between them, you have a three-day holiday.) Paperback price $13.40 for this shlock? I'd rather read a book.

Oh wait, here's a good one: National One-Hit Wonder Day was September 25, 2018. Wait -- it was September 25, 2017? But I just heard-- EVERY YEAR??? This soooo wrong.

awareness months
Various organizations lay claim to portions of the calendar for propaganda purposes. They usually take a day, a week, or a month. Most such designations seem, individually, to be useful or at worst anodyne. To politicians, it looks like a cheap way to satisfy constituents and look public-spirited into the bargain. Thus, it's easy to get lawmakers to vote, and chief executives to proclaim, that these designations are official lah-dee-dah. Therefore we'll pretty much ignore that.

Many of these observations, celebrations, PR events or what-have-you's have names that include ``Awareness Month,'' and many don't. Months claimed in connection with health issues are frequently named ``<Foobar> Awareness Month'' or ``<Foobar> Safety Month.'' Many related to group pride or solidarity of one sort or another get names including ``Heritage Month'' or ``History Month.'' Just to shake things up, some group is bound to rename its ``<Foobarian> Pride Month'' ``<Foobarian> History Awareness Month.'' And on the other side, the shills for research on one or another disease will discover that the victims live in shame, requiring ``Oblong Somitis Incognita Awareness Month'' to be rechristened ``OSI Pride Month.'' In short, I don't think the distinction between awareness months and pride months, say, is a sharp one, so I'm going to use this entry as a central repository for designated months, however designated. The entries for awareness days (eventually) and awareness weeks will function similarly.

There aren't a lot of awareness trimesters or awareness fortnights, although Prevent Blindness America does sponsor a 61-day ``month'' (see PBA). I can google up at most tens of thousands of awareness weekends, versus millions of weeks and months.

Most designated months coincide with calendar months. This is a sensible approach, since ``October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month'' is a little more memorable than, for example, ``The 31 days following the fifth day after the fourth Thursday in September are Breast Cancer Awareness Month.'' In order to discourage the sensible practice, I'll go out of my way to provide more extensive publicity -- a whole entry, say -- when I become aware of month-long awareness months that don't coincide with calendar months. The only one I have an entry for just now is Hispanic Heritage Month.

  • January: Autism Awareness Month.
  • January: Cervical Cancer Awareness Month or National Cervical Health Awareness Month.
  • January: National Birth Defects Prevention Month.
  • January: National Blood Donor Month.
    You'd figure they'd already need it for New Year's Eve (National Drunk Driving and Heavy Bleeding Awareness Night). Then again, maybe January is when all their regular contributors are all tapped out, so to speak.
  • January: National Glaucoma Awareness Month (see PBA).
  • January: Autism Awareness Month.
  • January: Autism Awareness Month.
  • January: Stop that!
  • January: Thyroid Awareness Month.
    Monitored or whatever by the AACE. Someday someone's going to notice that thyroid sounds like ``thigh 'roid,'' the same way someone once noticed that Uranus sounds like ``your anus.'' Then, in the same way that the pronunciation of Uranus drifted toward ``your a nuss'' (homophonous with the apparently preferable urinous), thyroid will begin to be pronounced ``thy roid'' or ``thirr ow id'' or something. That's the trouble with awareness -- it has unforeseen consequences.
  • February: African-American History Month.
  • February: AMD/Low Vision Awareness Month (see PBA).
  • February: Heart Month.
    Not like ``I <heart> NY.'' More like AHA.
  • March: Workplace Eye Health and Safety Awareness Month (see PBA).
  • March: Women's History Month.
  • March: Irish-American Heritage Month.
    (Hey, doesn't St. Patrick's Day fall on...)
  • April: Child Abuse Prevention Month.
  • April: Mathematics Awareness Month (MAM).
  • April: Women's Eye Health and Safety Month. (Apparently this month name is a trademark of the PBA. I think I'll stick with ``April,'' but thanks anyway.)
  • April: National Male Awareness Month.
    (For those who needed reminding?)
  • April: Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
    (A little consultation might have prevented an awareness-space collision.)
  • April: Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Awareness Month.
    (Neatly synthesizing the last two awarenesses. Sponsored ``for a number of years'' by 2012 by the BC Society for Male Survivors Of Sexual Abuse. BC stands for British Columbia.)
  • May: Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month.
    (In Canada, May is Asian Heritage Month. Inclusivity explicitness creep has not arrived yet.)
  • May: National Sight-Saving Month: Ultraviolet Awareness Month (ask PBA why ``Month'' has to be on both sides of the colon).
  • May: Older Americans Month.
    (Canada does not celebrate Older Americans Month.)
  • June: Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.
    (Really GLBT pride month, I think. The Stonewall anniversary is on June 25. NCOD is in October.)
  • June: Vision Research Month (see PBA).
  • August: Cataract Awareness Month. (Visit Niagara Falls! Oh, wait... visit PBA instead. Sorry.)
  • August: Children's Eye Health and Safety Month (see PBA).
  • August: National Physically Challenged Month.
  • September: Sports and Home Eye Safety Month (see PBA).
  • October: Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
  • October: Disability Employment Awareness Month.
    I'm aware that there has been a dramatic increase in disability unemployment: the percentage of American adults collecting federal disability insurance doubled between 1989 and 2010. The fastest-growing class of disability claims is mental disability.
  • October: Linguistic Inconsistency Awareness Month (LAME).
  • October: National Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
  • October: Polish American Heritage Month / Miesiac Dziedzictwa Polskiego w Ameryce.
    (Note that the English name implies a Polish celebration of American history, while the Polish name implies celebration of Polish and American history.)
  • November: American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month.
(``National,'' as in ``National Holiday,'' is the frequently elided first word in the official names -- as they occur in the presidential proclamations -- of many of the heritage and history months.)

I'm going to have to automate this. It's too much. In connection with the business of aligning awareness months with calendar months, let me note this: When Comte created the Positivist Calendar, even though he made 28-day months and intercalated five or six year-end days that had no weekday correspondences (so that the rest of the year, days of the week corresponded to date mod 7), he did align the years. (Year 1 coincided with year 1789 of the Gregorian calendar, naturally.)

awareness weeks
Awareness weeks are the young of awareness months, so go to that entry for information about the species generally. Here's a list of awareness weeks that (a) I am aware of or (b) I was aware of:
  • National Handwashing Awareness Week
    (In 2006, it was December 3-9)
    Learn about the Four Principles of Hand Awareness at the homepage of Henry the Hand, Champion Handwasher.
  • National Folic Acid Awareness Week
    (January 8-14 in 2007)
    Become acutely aware at the website of the National Council on Folic Acid.
  • Sea Otter Awareness Week
    (September 25 to October 1 in 2011)
    Cute and furry!
  • National Robotics Week
    (April 7-15 in 2012)
    Interestingly, the text string "Asimov" does not occur on any page of <nationalroboticsweek.org> that Google has crawled. Granted, that seems to be no more than a couple of dozen webpages.

AWAS
Automated Work Administration System.

AWB
Afrikaner Weerstands Beweging. Afrikaans: `Afrikaner Resistance Movement.' A neonazi party in South Africa, led by Eugene Terreblanche, sentenced to six years in prison for the attempted murder of a black man, who was paralyzed in the beating.

The party flag is essentially the same as the flag of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of Germany (black device on white disc on red field), except that the four-armed black swastika is replaced by a three-legged black triskelion. Supposedly, this emblem represents three sevens.

AWB
Auto White Balance.

AWD
All-Wheel Drive. Hey, just try driving without one.

AWD on a vehicle with four wheels sounds like it ought to be equivalent to 4WD, but it's not. 4WD includes ``low-range'' (high torque) gearing for deep mud or snow or steep grades. A 4WD must be stopped or slowed to a crawl to shift in or out of low range (done by toggling a switch or lever). AWD is power to all wheels, but without the special gearing.

AWD, .awd
At Work Document. Microsoft-defined file type and filename extension for a compressed bitmap format used for faxes. Specifically, an OLE compound object file that stores bilevel (B&W) facsimile data. The compression algorithm used in AWD is not published, but is based on CCITT Group 4.

AWDS
Active Wavelength Demodulation System.

AWE
Advanced Warfighting Experiments.

AWF
Asian Weightlifting Federation.

AWG
American Wire Gauge. A set of numbers designating of (US) standard wire thicknesses.

AWG
Arbitrary Waveform Generation.

AWG
Array Waveguide Grating.

AWG
American Wire Gauge.

AWGN
Additive White Gaussian Noise. Not very realistic sometimes, but a mathematically tractable and convenient model for the systematic analysis of linear systems.

AWGTHTGTATA
Are We Going To Have To Go Through All { That | This } Again?

AWGTHTGTTA
Are We Going To Have To Go Through { That | This } Again?

AWI
Alert With Info.

The Strawberry Statement collects the scattered thoughts of James Kunen, a 60's student radical at Columbia University. (Bibliographic details at the AAHM entry.) It's written in diary style, so I can tell you that on a Tuesday, July 16, 1968, the author visited the programming director at WABC radio in New York City. The two had a mutually unsatisfactory meeting, but agreed that there was some news content on the mostly-music-format WABC-AM, in the form of two newscasts per hour. Kunen felt these were insufficently detailed, and characterized them for the book: ``Canada is still sinking and the Russians have bombed Detroit, now back to the Show.''

AWIC
Animal Welfare Information Center. I'm out of work. Can my dog get food stamps from Animal WIC? No, AWIC is part of the National Agricultural Library.

AWIPS
Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System.

AWIS
Association for Women in Science.

awk.
Copyeditor's abbreviation for awkward.
[This glossary entry is just begging for a juicy example, isn't it?]

awk
A pattern-matching utility in Unix. Named after the last initials of its creators Al Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. Kind of a batch version of sed.

Depending on your release, this may differ from nawk (New awk).

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes a couple of awk programs.

AWL
Animal Welfare League.

awl
A simple tool -- something like an ice-pick -- for making holes in leather. An ice-pick usually has a long handle like that of a screwdriver. An ice-pick applies impact force; it is held in the fist, about as a dagger is held. An awl applies steady pressure to a precise point; its handle has a blunter end that can be cupped in the palm. All the awls I've seen, anyway.

Nowadays, shoe repair and manual shoe manufacture have gone the way of cobblestones. I suspect that most English-speakers' first encounter with the word awl, or even with the concept, occurs in Shakespeare's tragedy ``Julius Caesar,'' in the punny opening scene. Sadly, the standard (Schlegel) German translation is missing this bit. It wouldn't have been hard to recreate the pun: English awl and all can be translated to Ahle and alle. (The respective initial vowels here are short and long in quantity, but these are close enough for a good pun -- especially with a good actor's pronunciation.)

AWMA
Air and Waste Management Association.

AWMA
American Wholesale Marketers Association.

[column]

AWMC
Ancient World Mapping Center.

AWOG
American Women's Organization of Greece.

AWOL
Absent WithOut Leave. This is a US military acronym, but even outside the military, I think it is one of the best known of military acronyms. The writer of an AP news item distributed September 8, 2004, seemed to think it necessary to define it (incorrectly, of course, as ``Away Without Leave'').

It's also occasionally expanded as ``absent without official leave,'' but in the military usage it is implicit that leave must be granted offically, or rather by a commanding officer. The way the Oxford Dictionary of the US Military handles this is to expand it as ``absent without (official) leave.'' They claim the acronym came into use in the 1920's, but I think it was already in use during WWI. Various American soldiers AWOL from their units during one or another World War are complaisantly mentioned by Gertrude Stein in some of her books.

[column]

AWOL
Ancient World OnLine.

[column]

AWOTV
Ancient World On TeleVision.

AWP
The Association of Writers and Writing Programs. It's hardly surprising that there'd be some association.

AWP
Average Wholesale Price.

AWRAD
Arab World for Research & Development. It's ``an independent research center (registered with the Ministry of Economy)... works in social political and economic research and development... highest standards in research methods including surveys, opinion polls, focus groups, in-depth interviews, and case studies.'' It conducts projects throughout the Arab world, but it seems to be based in Morocco.

AWS
American Welding Society.

AWS
Automatic Warning System. Now installed on most British railway lines; first used in 1948. By each signal there is one permanent magnet and one electromagnet that is energized when the signal is green. When the train passes the signal, a bell sounds in the driver's cab if it's green, and a horn otherwise.

When the horn sounds, the driver must push a button within a few seconds or else the brakes will be applied. Since the 1950's there has also been a mechanical visual display which changes to a sunburst pattern when the button is pushed, and to plain black when the bell rings.

Such a system is called ``fail-safe'' because its failure modes are designed to be safe. For example, in a power failure, the electromagnet goes off and the system signals to stop; if the brakeman is incapacitated, the brake goes on automatically. A common way for fail-safe systems to fail to perform safely as designed is by being turned off.

In the Jethro Tull song `Locomotive Breath,' Ian Anderson sings something like

old Charlie stole the handle
and the train it won't stop going no it couldn't slow down

For more railway-related songs, visit this chronological listing with comments or this alphabetic list.

The word fail-safe came into popular use with the novel Fail-safe, by Eugene Burdick & Harvey Wheeler, (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1962). This story of accidental nuclear war was published during the Cuban missile crisis and was made into a movie of the same name (Dr. Strangelove without the yuks).

AWST, AW&ST
Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine.

AWT
Abstract Window Toolkit. Provides the Java GUI. Contained in the java.awt package. (A package is a collection of importable classes. Don't you just love the uneven level of detail you get in this glossary?)

AWW
Common abbreviation for Shakespeare's play All's Well That Ends Well.

AWWA
American Water Works Association. ``[A]n international nonprofit scientific and educational society dedicated to the improvement of drinking water quality and supply. Founded in 1881, AWWA is the largest organization of water supply professionals in the world. Its more than 50,000 members represent the full spectrum of the drinking water community: treatment plant operators and managers, scientists, environmentalists, manufacturers, academicians, regulators, and others who hold genuine interest in water supply and public health. Membership includes more than 3,700 utilities that supply water to roughly 170 million people in North America,'' including Mexico, where the word for water (agua) sounds more like awwa than it looks, because the g in Spanish is glottal. (The Spanish word is derived from the Latin aqua; for a similar pun on this, see OCWA.)

The consonantal w is a glide, and if one purses the lips slightly when pronouncing it, one produces a bilabial sound that is represented by a beta in the IPA, and which is the usual sound of b in Spanish. It is therefore not surprising that in ordinary speech, the glottal g and bilabial b of Spanish sound similar. This has led to some orthographic changes. For example, in Cervantes's original text, the word for `grandmother,' now spelled abuela, was spelled aguela. For some discussion of the Modern Greek g (gamma), see the galaxy entry.

Haested Methods sponsors a number of electronic discussion groups related to water works. See their forums page for information about WaterTalk, SewerTalk, StormTalk, and GISTalk. They also sponsor a Spanish-language version of WaterTalk, called AquaForo.

AWWARF
American Water Works Association (AWWA) Research Foundation.

Aww, mama
can this really be the end?
To be stuck inside of Mobile,
With the Memphis blues again.

Refrain of ``Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again.'' First released by Bob Dylan on ``Blonde on Blonde'' (1966).

AWWOTL
A Webpage Wasted On Tom Lehrer. This GeoCities site has been deactivated due to inactivity. Are you the site owner? Click here to reactivate your site.

There was also A [now defunct] Webpage (Wasted) On Tom Lehrer. Maybe it was related content. The names allude to his 1959 album, ``An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer.''

AWWWA
Asociación World Wide Web Argentina. (A translation? Hmmm. Let's see if we can guess something here... maybe, em, could be sort of rough, but, uhh, well, something like ``Argentine WWW Association''?)

AX
Architecture eXtended. (Antediluvian PC/AT term.)

ax
Axe, hatchet.

AXAF
Advanced X-ray Astronomical Facility.

AXCP
Airborne eXpendable Current Profiler.

AXE
Another one of those secret North Germanic acronyms, like KLM. Its expansion is probably an off-color inside joke, but ... ``The AXE system is Ericsson's core switching platform for all narrowband and wideband public network switching applications well into the [twenty-first] century.''

axial lead
Refers to a cylindrical two-lead electrical package with one lead coming out of the center of each end. Cf. radial lead.

axiom
An obvious or generally accepted proposition. The word reached English via French axiome < Latin axioma < Greek axíôma, `that which is worthy or fit.'

Probably the best-known statement of an axiom is the first sentence of chapter I in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Axioms explicitly so-called occur most often in mathematics. Most high-school students used to make the acquaintance of axioms, even if they did not come into a friendly relationship with them (i.e., even if they didn't exactly become familiar) in standard one-year courses in formal geometry. That was before high-school geometry courses were abased by mathematics-hating ``teachers'' and other saboteurs of children's education, who adopted wretched books full of time-wasting pictures and geometry-related stories with a very optional afterthought chapter or two about proofs at the end.

Euclid's geometry text taught rigor of thought to over twenty centuries'-worth of schoolboys. Euclid made a distinction between axioms and postulates, explained at the postulate entry.

AXP
Anomalous X-ray Pulsar.

AY
Academic Year. Here're the AY calendars for UB in 1995-1996 and 1996-1997.

AYAA
Alpha Youth Athletic Association. Funded by the Borough of Alpha, New Jersey.

AYCE
All You Can Eat.

AYL
Common abbreviation for Shakespeare's play As You Like It.

AYLOR
Ask Your Local Orthodox Rabbi. (Also: ordained rabbi.) It's a lot faster than wading through the enormous Judaism FAQ. Same as CYLOR.

AYNNNI
You have my permission to pronounce this like the word its very creation suggests. A simple two-dimensional locally-anisotropic lattice-gas model (for CuO-plane superconductivity) with nearest- and Next-Nearest-Neighbor Interactions, originally proposed by D. de Fontaine, L. T. Wille and S. C. Moss in Phys. Rev. B, vol. 36, pp. 5709ff (1987). I'm not sure if the author list includes the name of the graduate student whose job was to carry the acronym expansion tools.

AYOP
America's Youth on Parade.
``There's no twirling spectacular quite like AYOP. It brings together the best baton twirlers, teams and corps in the world for a series of National and World Open Championship contests - all under one umbrella. It can be appropriately called the `World Series of Baton Twirling' ... sanctioned by the NBTA INTERNATIONAL.''

And where are AYOP events held??? That's right -- they're ``held [every year in July] in the spacious, air conditioned Notre Dame University Athletic and Convocation Center (JACC)''!!!! Hip-hip hooray! Hip-hip-hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Go! Fight! Win! Hip-hip hoo--what? Oh, it's not cheerleading? Better go to the majorette entry (once it exists) and learn more.

AYP
Adequate Yearly Progress. Under the terms of the NCLB Act, federal (US) funding depends on demonstrated AYP. Measures of AYP, in order to be considered valid for NCLB purposes, must have a 95% student participation rate. (There are easy ways around this requirement, I think. When similar state-level legislation was implemented in Texas, large numbers of the poorest-performing students were recategorized as learning-disabled or encouraged to drop out and enroll in GED programs, and some exam papers were doctored.)

AZ
Arizona. USPS abbreviation.

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Arizona. USACityLink.com has a page for Arizona.

Arizona is a community property state.

The US is the world's second-largest copper producer after Chile. Each produces about two million tons a year. You might ask: if they both produce about that much, and if production varies by maybe 10% year-to-year (how did you know that?), then how come Chile is consistently first and the US consistently second? Go ahead, ask, I can answer. The reason is, production is driven by the market. In a year with high demand, prices go up and production everywhere increases, so while the overall numbers vary a lot, the ratio of production between major producers varies less rapidly. Part of how this works is that the cost of extraction varies for different sources. At any given time some sources are not worth using. When prices increase, it becomes profitable to use those higher-cost resources. Major producing countries like the US and Chile have a number of such mines, so production by both varies with world demand. Some statistics show this kicking-in of higher-cost resources. In the US, Arizona is has the richest and most economically efficient copper mines, and in a typical year between a half and two thirds of US production comes from Arizona. When demand is low and increases rapidly, most of the extra production comes from Arizona, which has ready excess capacity. On the other hand, when demand increases steadily, Arizona's share declines, as higher-cost producers enter the market. Instead of saying Arizona here, I probably should be saying Phelps-Dodge.

Of course, a lot of other factors affect production, such as resource depletion, lack of investment capital (a major factor for Zambia), political issues (gee, why can't Zambia just borrow abroad on the strength of its rich resources, and why did the bottom fall out of Zairian production in the early nineties?), personnel and transport (proximity to market) considerations, etc.

.az
(Domain code for) Azerbaijan.

AZA
American Zinc Association. More links for Zinc at Zn.

AZA
Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Founded in 1924 as the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums (and abbreviated AAZPA), later known as the American Zoo and Aquarium Association. I think the current name (I write in 2009) was adopted around 1997. The abbreviation AAZA and the name ``American Association of Zoos and Aquariums'' (those are prophylactic quotation marks) have also been used. With all these different tags, I would have liked, just once, for them to have used ``aquaria'' in the name. Heck, I'll do it myself.

AZADHO
Association zaïroise de défense des droits de l'homme. `Zaire Association for the Defense of Human Rights.' Founded in 1991. Changed its name to ASADHO when Mobutu's government fell and Laurent Kabila changed the country's name to Democratic Republic of the Congo.

azafata
Spanish: `hostess, stewardess.' General term for an attendant at a public gathering or on a plane or train, etc. ``Attendant'' here is meant in the usual sense of someone who attends to the needs of the public, rather than someone who simply attends an event (attendee). That might be a public attendant. Everything would be so much easier if ``servant'' didn't have such poor connotations. Anyway, the male form of the word is azafato. Azafata and azafato are the only terms I've ever heard used in Spanish that would be translated as `flight attendant.' The fact that the attendance takes place on a plane is apparently not regarded as meriting explicit recognition.

azar
Spanish noun (masculine) meaning `luck, fortune' or `good fortune,' just as the English noun luck means luck or `good luck,' depending on whether you're speaking generally or wishing it to someone. ``Juegos de azar'' are `games of chance.'

It's slightly unusual to have a noun ending in -ar that isn't the noun use of a verb infinitive, but you get used to it before the time when you can remember getting used to it. Another slight oddity: the woman's name Pilar. [Other non-infinitive nouns ending in -ar that I can think of are male: pulgar (`thumb'), collar (`necklace'). Mar is trickier; see its entry.] The word asar, which in Latin American prounciations is a homophone of azar, is a verb meaning `cook over an open flame.' Asado, meaning precisely `grilled beef steak,' is the national dish of Argentina.

Latin had four classes of verbs, whose active infinitives (if they weren't deponent verbs they had active infinitives) ended in -are, -ire, or -ere. (That's right: mere spelling didn't quite tell you the conjugation of -ere verbs.) The -are class was the largest, I'm pretty sure. Romance languages typically collapsed these four regular conjugations into three, and the conjugation that collected the -are verbs (-ar in Spanish) were usually still the largest group. Modern Greek has a class of verbs with infinitives ending in -aro. It dates back to Byzantine times, when it was constructed on the basis of -are verbs borrowed from Italian (or perhaps more precisely Venetian). The ending is highly productive, and seems to provide the most common conjugation for loan verbs. For example, stoparo and sakaro (`to stop, to shock') are standard in Modern (demotic) Greek today. (German has a similar class of verbs, with infinitives ending in -ieren, mostly borrowed from French.)

Greek-speakers living in foreign countries often use this conjugation to create hybrids used in local versions of Greek (a North American example: muvaro, `to move'). The pattern is not uniform, however. Greeks in Germany use preparizo for `to prepare,' from the German preparieren. The German verb is borrowed, in turn, from the French preparer. This verb is also an -are verb (viz., it's derived from the Latin preparare). I believe that Latin -are verbs generally ended up as -er verbs in Modern French.

azide, azido-
An azide is an organic chemical with an N3 functional group. That is, a chemical which can be represented by the formula

RN3

where N is nitrogen and R represents a molecule bonded to the functional group through a carbon chain. Particular azides have names including the prefix azido-.

Note carefully the difference between an azide and an amine. An azide has three nitrogens bonded to one organic group; an amine has three organic groups bonded to one nitrogen (R3N).

AZLA
The AriZona Language Association, Inc. ``[T]he not-for-profit professional association for language teachers in Arizona, dedicated to promoting the effective teaching of all languages. AZLA is the Arizona affiliate of ACTFL (the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages) and SWCOLT (the Southwest Conference on Language Teaching).''

AZO
AZOmethane. (CH3)2N2.

AzPA
AriZona Planning Association. A chapter of the APA.

A-Z soup
Just give it a second. You can figure this one out.

AZT
AZidoThymidine. Systematic name, minus the numbers: dihydro methyl pyridinyl carbonyl azido dideoxythymidine. It has a lot of alternate trivial names, such as retrovir and zidovudine (abbreviated ZDV). It's an important AIDS drug, in the class of NRTI's. Like all of the drugs first found effective against AIDS, it somehow blocks the action of reverse transcriptase, which a retrovirus like HIV uses to insert its RNA-encoded genetic instructions into the host cell's DNA.

AZTEC
A time-release form of AZT.

azurite
A characteristic copper ore: Cu3(CO3)2(OH)2 with this structure:

                   H
                    \
                     \
                      O
                     /
                    /
                  Cu
                    \
                     \
                      O
                     /
                    /
              O == C
                    \
                     \
                      O
                     /
                    /
                  Cu
                    \
                     \
                      O
                     /
                    /
              O == C
                    \
                     \
                      O
                     /
                    /
                  Cu
                    \
                     \
                      O
                     /
                    /
                   H

The mineral takes its name from its color. For more about the occurrence of this hydroxy-carbonate, see the Fahlerz entry. For a similar mineral, see malachite.

AzVMA
AriZona Veterinary Medical Association. See also AVMA.

azzume
Indian pronunciation of English assume.

a0
Bohr Radius. The radius of the orbit of an electron in Bohr's model of the hydrogen atom, it is also the scale parameter in the eigenstates of the Schrödinger equation for the hydrogen atom. It's about 0.52917721 Å, or about two nanoïnches in, uh, customary units. The Bohr radius is itself used as a unit of length (as, for example, in the definition of a dimensionless screening radius rs). As a length unit, the Bohr radius is also called a bohr (q.v.).

The formula for the Bohr radius is

               ħ
        a  = ----- ,
         0
              αcm
                 0

where ħ is the reduced Planck's constant (h/2π), α the fine-structure constant, c the speed of light in vacuum, and m0 the free electron mass.

If you want to compute the properties of an isolated hydrogen atom, you start with the complete Hamiltonian for the nucleus and electron, and separate out the Hamiltonian for the center-of-mass motion. This leaves a Hamiltonian for the electron-nucleus separation. (In classical physics, the Hamiltonian is a function of independent momentum and coordinate variables, and ``canonical'' equations of motion equivalent to Newton's equations are obtained as first-order partial differential equations involving the Hamiltonian. In quantum mechanics, the Hamiltonian is an operator function of momentum and coordinate operators, and it is formally identical to the classical Hamiltonian so long as intrinsic spin is ignored. The Schrödinger equation is a first-order partial differential equation involving the quantum Hamiltonian.)

Anyway -- the Hamiltonian, or any equations derived from it, looks similar for the electron-nucleus separation as for an electron orbiting an infinite-mass nucleus, but with a ``reduced mass'' (its value, half the harmonic mean of the electron and nuclear masses, is about 0.05% smaller than the free electron mass). Using the reduced mass can give you a slight improvement in accuracy for an even slighter amount of computational work, if all you're dealing with is an atom with one electron, or a Rydberg atom with only one highly excited electron. (A Rydberg atom is an atom with one or few electrons in large-n states, and the other electrons not in highly excited states.) The Bohr radius, however, is defined using the free electron mass, and not the reduced mass.

A0
Diode imperfection factor (A). The zero subscript indicates that the correction is applied to a particularly elementary model: a single-exponential (Ebers-Moll) model.

A0
A paper dimension standard used only in those corners of the world (mostly just a few remote stations in Antarctica, a bunch of Pacific islands, some parts of North America, and the continents of Australia, Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia) that stubbornly cling to centuries-old metric units. A0 sheets have a total area of 1 square meter, and a ratio of length to width that is the square root of 2. Each successive standard size (A1, A2, ...) is defined by halving the length of the longer side of the sheet, thus preserving the ratio of height to width. The earliest known suggestion of this scheme was by Georg Lichtenberg, in a letter to Johann Beckmann date October 25, 1786. [The old quarto, octavo, 16mo, etc. are also defined by successive halvings, but have two width and length ratios (whose geometric mean, of course, is also the square root of 2). Cf. B0.]

Name Area (sq cm) Width (cm) Length (cm) Length (in)
A0
10000
84.09
118.92
46.82
A1
5000
59.46
84.09
33.11
A2
2500
42.04
59.46
23.41
A3
1250
29.73
42.04
16.55
A4
625
21.02
29.73
11.70
A5
312.5
14.87
21.02
8.28
A6
156.25
10.51
14.87
5.85

It is superfluous to note that Hermann Melville was rather a literary naturalist. But in chapter 32 (``Cetology'') of Moby Dick, he makes a surprisingly direct connection: ``According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all, both small and large. I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE. As the type of the FOLIO I present the SPERM WHALE; of the OCTAVO, the GRAMPUS; of the DUODECIMO, the PORPOISE.'' After enumerating the Folio whales, he writes (the ``books'' here are still metaphorical; we continue in chapter 32 of Moby Dick):

      Thus ends BOOK I. (Folio), and now begins BOOK II. (Octavo).

OCTAVOES.*--These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which present may be numbered:--I., the GRAMPUS; II., the BLACK FISH; III., the NARWHALE; IV., the THRASHER; V., the KILLER.

*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its dimensioned form does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does.

A1
A paper size. See A0.

A-1
Tops. In the best category.

A1AD
Alpha1-Antitrypsin Deficiency. ``[A] genetic condition that can cause severe early onset emphysema, liver disease in both children and adults, or more rarely, a skin condition called panniculitis. It is estimated [that] there are 80,000 to 100,000 men, women and children with A1AD in the United States, yet only a fraction of them have been identified,'' according to...

A1NA
Alpha1 National Association. ``[A] non-profit, membership organization, dedicated to improving the lives of individuals and their families affected by alpha1-antitrypsin deficiency.''

A1NA2
This was the ``number'' on the vanity plate issued by the state of California for a car belonging to Lawrence Welk. If you're much younger than me, you probably don't get it. Lawrence Welk had an orchestra and a television show (called ``The Lawrence Welk Show''), and his trademark way to set the beat to begin a piece was to say ``uh-one and-uh two and-uh.''

A2
A paper size. See A0.

A2
You mean the UK school-leaving exams? See A-levels. Part of a system that might very well end up being a one-off for 2002.

[column]

A2A
Alexander to Actium, by Peter M. Green.

A.2d
Atlantic Reporter, Second Series. Legal publication.

A2FCS
Advanced Antennas for Future Combat Systems. CECOM research program.

A2LA
American Association for Laboratory Accreditation. ``[A] non-profit, professional membership society committed to the success of laboratories through the administration of a broad-spectrum, nationwide laboratory accreditation system and a full range of training on laboratory practices taught by experts in their field.''

``A2LA accredits testing laboratories in the following fields: acoustics and vibration, biological, chemical, construction materials, electrical, environmental, geotechnical, mechanical, calibration, nondestructive and thermal. Accreditation is available to private, independent, in-house and government labs.''

Based in Frederick, MD.

A2HPS3
Try AAHPSSS

A3
A paper size. See A0.

A3CR2
American Association of Academic Chief Residents in Radiology. The AUR link on the A3CR2 page is less prominent or direct than the A3CR2 link on the AUR page. I guess we understand the pecking order here.

The social science of small-group interactions would probably explain why the APDR doesn't get a link at A3CR2: this town ain't big enough for two alphas.

``Ay THREE cee arr two.'' It has kind of a ring to it, but they should drop the ``two'' so it scans with ``cee THREE pee oh.''

A4
A paper size. See A0.

A5
A paper size. See A0.

A6
A paper size. See A0.

A $60 value, and you also get...
Oh sure, you could go to the mall today and get it for $17.98, but what do they know about value? And you don't get the convenience of ordering from the comfort of your own living room couch what you can see clearly right there on your TV screen, and having it delivered to your front door in ``just days.''

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